Should people still learn to code?

Should people still learn to code?

The current conversations around coding and AI

There’s a new conversation happening across AI and tech circles: should people still learn to code now that AI is moving so fast? And the debate is much bigger than just “yes or no”.

On one side, some argue that traditional coding might become less relevant.
AI models like Claude and Gemini are already writing high-quality code, faster and cheaper than most humans. Predictions even suggest that AI could soon handle almost all new code creation with the real bottleneck being human and organisational inertia, not technology itself.

The idea is that learning to code from scratch could soon be a lower-return investment, and that the real leverage will be knowing how to guide AI, not how to code manually.

But there’s another side too: learning the basics of coding still teaches you how to think critically, how to solve complex problems, and how to structure ideas logically.
Plus, developers who know how to work with AI can move faster and build smarter than either humans or machines could alone.

Understanding how to read, debug, and refine AI-generated outputs is still crucial especially when things get messy inside bigger, more complex systems and right now, AI tools aren’t perfect at innovating from scratch, or building things at enterprise level without human oversight.

What’s emerging is a new way of thinking about coding altogether: some call it “vibe coding” or “coding 2.0”: instead of writing every line yourself, you’re guiding AI through natural language prompts. English, not python or solidity, is starting to feel like the real universal programming language.
And the most valuable skill? it’s not just coding anymore — it’s knowing how to work with AI to build, test, and create smarter.

So yes, the conversation has not one clear answer but it’s more and more clear that the old idea of learning to code to land a junior dev job is starting to be questioned.

What’s rising instead is a world where collaborating with AI through prompting, understanding, and verifying becomes the real foundation of digital creation with manual coding (“coding 1.0”) slowly making way for a new era of AI-assisted building (“coding 2.0”).