There have been ominous predictions about the future of coding given how rapidly AI seems to be getting good at it, but a prominent voice in tech seems to believe that AI has made coders more powerful than ever before.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has said that it’s more important than ever to learn to code in the age of AI. “I’ve been meeting a lot of 18-19 year olds who are freshmen and they’re like, well, the code will write itself, right? I don’t have to study this stuff anymore. And I’m like, no, that’s not true at all. It is far more leverage to know how to code than ever before. And it’s actually even more important and it will make you way more powerful,” he said in an interview.
“You don’t have to be all the way in the weeds on everything. You actually are going to be able to orchestrate this giant army of (AI) agents. It’ll be like learning a new magical ability,” he added. Tan said that this ability for people build whatever software they wanted — in very quick time — could be extremely powerful.
Tan’s views were echoed by Replit founder Amjad Massad. “I try to come up with a Moore’s law type type of thing where the return on learning is doubling every six months or something like that. So learning code a little bit in 2020 was not that useful because you get blocked, you wouldn’t know how to deploy something. You wouldn’t know how to configure something,” he said.
“(But in) 2023 with ChatGPT, learning to code just a little bit would’ve got you fairly far because ChatGPT could help you. And then in 2024, learning to code a little bit is a massive leverage because we have agents and there’s a lot of really cool tools out there like Cursor and others that will get you super far by just like having a little bit of coding. And just extend that forward like six months later, you’re gonna have even more power. So programmers are just on this massive trajectory of increased power.” he said.
AI models like ChatGPT have become increasingly sophisticated at coding since being introduced two years ago. These models don’t only assist coders with writing their code like Microsoft Copilot, but tools like Cursor AI can write large bits of codes without much human intervention. Indeed, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had recently said that 25 percent of the code at Google was now being written by AI. But some tech leaders believe that this doesn’t make coding less relevant — in fact, people who know how to code can now build entire products by themselves, and end up create more value than ever before.