You Should Still Learn To Code, Says GitHub CEO (businessinsider.com) 26
You should still learn to code, says GitHub's CEO. And you should start as soon as possible. From a report: "I strongly believe that every kid, every child, should learn coding," Thomas Dohmke said in a recent podcast interview with EO. "We should actually teach them coding in school, in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and what-not." Coding, he added, is one such fundamental skill -- and the only reason it's not part of the curriculum is because it took "us too long to actually realize that."
Dohmke, who's been a programmer since the 90s, said he's never seen "anything more exciting" than the current moment in engineering -- the advent of AI, he believes, has made the field that much easier to break into, and is poised to make software more ubiquitous than ever. "It's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into Copilot or ChatGPT or similar tools, and it will likely write you a basic webpage, or a small application, a game in Python," Dohmke said. "And so, AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding."
AI, Dohmke said, helps to "realize the dream" of bringing an idea to life, meaning that fewer projects will end up dead in the water, and smaller teams of developers will be enabled to tackle larger-scale projects. Dohmke said he believes it makes the overall process of creation more efficient. "You see some of the early signs of that, where very small startups -- sometimes five developers and some of them actually only one developer -- believe they can become million, if not billion dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them," he added.
Dohmke, who's been a programmer since the 90s, said he's never seen "anything more exciting" than the current moment in engineering -- the advent of AI, he believes, has made the field that much easier to break into, and is poised to make software more ubiquitous than ever. "It's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into Copilot or ChatGPT or similar tools, and it will likely write you a basic webpage, or a small application, a game in Python," Dohmke said. "And so, AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding."
AI, Dohmke said, helps to "realize the dream" of bringing an idea to life, meaning that fewer projects will end up dead in the water, and smaller teams of developers will be enabled to tackle larger-scale projects. Dohmke said he believes it makes the overall process of creation more efficient. "You see some of the early signs of that, where very small startups -- sometimes five developers and some of them actually only one developer -- believe they can become million, if not billion dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them," he added.
The "co" doesn't stand for what you think. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
It'll be fine, the AI will just eat it's own regurgitation until it becomes retarded. Then people will stop using it and start coding for real again. After a period of fresh human code generation, a shiny new AI will eat everything, become retarded, rinse, repeat. Maybe rinse without fluoride on alternate cycles.
Re: (Score:2)
That has already started, the AI generated code can be worse than it was a few months ago. Even if I tell GitHub Copilot it is hallucinating API calls that do not exist, it still gives them back to me over and over.
I find it useful to give me skeleton implementation of my unit tests, that's usually a time saver, but is rarely 100% working.
Alternate headline (Score:2)
Headline: "You should still learn to code, says the CEO of GitHub"
Alternate headline: "Public schools frustrated in choosing which foreign language course to remove so that coding courses can be taught. Foreign language teachers worried about their jobs."
Of course this needs a /s ...(random) For some unknown reason, around 2074, all of the poetry and song lyrics converged to a restricted band of similar phrases, words and inflections...
Physics? (Score:2)
Eggs are good for you.. eggs are bad for you.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Roomba CEO: People don't need to learn to clean.
Broomsticks Inc. CEO: Vaccum cleaners are overrated.
Good luck with that (Score:3)
Paraphrasing TFS:
"It's so much easier to get into music creation now. You can just write a prompt into Suno or similar tools, and it'll likely generate a basic melody, a full song, or even a catchy jingle," Dohmke said. "And so, AI makes songwriting so much more accessible for anyone who wants to explore making music."
Playing with AI tools is absolutely fine if you're dicking around with things for your own amusement, but you have to remember everyone now has access to these exact same tools. You're not a special snowflake because you've written a prompt. Rather hilariously, I think I've actually seen people complain on Reddit that their AI generated works were rejected by employers/record labels/etc. because everybody and their brother now fancies themselves a rockstar coder, author, or songwriter because they have a ChatGPT account. I'm reminded of that line from the movie The Incredibles:
Syndrome: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat *you*! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics anyone's ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super... ...*no one* will be.
[laughs maniacally]
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
everybody and their brother now fancies themselves a rockstar coder
I'm a network guy who dabbles in Python for the purpose of utilizing the GPIO on my Raspberry Pis. I am certainly not a developer, and would never want to be as I find debugging frustrating, however at a friend's suggestion I recently gave Copilot a try. It is certainly good enough for my needs, it can indeed do everything for me. Totally not learning much doing it that way though, so I've gone back to figuring things out on my own. If you understand what you are doing, I can totally see the usefulness of such a shortcut. If you don't understand what you are doing shortcuts won't change that.
Agreed, but... (Score:2)
Only those with talent should learn. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at coding, and not all can do it.
Everyone who works with code should master the AI tools, but use them as tools, not as a substitute for understanding.
Totally relying on a robot to do all the work with nobody able to understand what they made is a recipe for disaster
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A special kind of mind to code? No it just means they can't do math and never got past Calc 1 in whatever paper mill they attended.
80% of programmers suck, 18% is at best mid the remainder actually have a math degree and know what there doing.
Re: (Score:2)
It requires a special kind of mind to do math competently ...
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Disagree on the AI tools. All they do is hold you back when learning actual skills.
Teaching In Schools (Score:3)
That's laughable on its face. Where are these competent teachers supposed to come from? Nothing I learned in public school was relevant to the real world as it is.
That won't end well. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you learned to read and write and structure basic texts. You may even have learned basic algebra.
Re: Teaching In Schools (Score:2)
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
Re: (Score:2)
And I've known how to code my entire professional life. I had a six-figure career as a senior software engineer by age 33.
Same story... but I've still got it (making a little under double, now) 10 years later.
Is it possible you just.... sucked?
Analogies (Score:4, Interesting)
Since you can get a taxi, you don't need to walk. So why bother walking?
Since you can buy ready meals in the supermarket, you don't need a cooker, only a microwave, and don't need to learn to cook. So why bother learning cooking?
And why bother lifting weights in the gym if you can make a machine to do the work for you?
The biggest benefit of learning to code is how it trains your brain.
Re: (Score:2)
The biggest benefit of learning to code is how it trains your brain.
Very true.
Devil's advocate: effective use of LLMs for code generation requires essentially the same skills - breaking a workflow down into steps, modeling real world objects as data, etc. Just at a higher level.
That nonsense again... (Score:2)
No. Coding is a specialist skills. You can expect some basic (!) coding skills form any type of engineer and mathematician. But that is it. Requiring others to learn is just wasting their time and preventing them from learning actually useful things instead.
uh (Score:2)
"We should actually teach them coding in school, in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and what-not."
So... Inadequately?