Should you learn to code?

Day 63 / 366

The CEO of Nvidia recently said in an interview that we should not encourage young people to learn how to code. His point is that AI will soon be good enough to write code for us, and all we need to know is how to prompt the AI to do what we want it to do.

I think this is a big 180 to what the consensus was just a couple of years back. Everyone wanted kids to learn how to code. We were told that it would be a basic skill that everyone would require, just like doing arithmetics or speaking English.

To be honest, I do not agree with this new trend that we should give up on coding. And it might be a bit biased because my whole career depends on it, but I think I have valid reasons for my stance.

Firstly, AI is not just there yet. I have made countless blog posts about how ChatGPT fails to deliver on complex tasks. Lots of announcements are made about the next big thing in AI, but it has yet to translate into usable products for the masses. So I think we are 3–4 years away from having AI write all our code for us, and if that’s the case I think it would be worth learning how to code so that you can do your work efficiently for these 3–4 years.

Secondly, people forget how much time it takes for mass adoption of any new tech. Computers and Digitized documents have been around for decades. Still, most hospitals and offices in our country use paper documents. It’s not that the tech is not there, it just takes time to convince people and businesses to adopt it. So after the 3–4 years of AI becoming good enough, I would suggest adding another 5 for it to get adopted in a significant way.

So you have about a decade of coding still being useful to you. And I think it's stupid to advise kids to forget about it. Calculators didn’t replace mathematicians. When we were in school, we were still taught how to do long division with a pen and paper, and I don’t think that is a useless skill to have.

And lastly, there is always the risk that AI and LLMs do not live up to the hype. The bet that most big companies are placing on AI right now is that with better resources and time the performance of these models will keep going up. But no one can say that for sure.