Should people still learn to code now that AI can write code?

Amjad Masad · Mar 10, 2023

Software is a superpower currently locked in the ivory tower of the Silicon Valley elite, and it will follow the trajectory of the printing press by spreading to everyone

Before the printing press only the priesthood could read and write; once everyone could, the world changed — software is at the same juncture

Scope: stated as Replit's core company insight

10:38 20VC: Why AI Will Lead to Thousands of Billionaires and Elon Musk's, Will TikTok Be Banned and How Facebook Should Be Investing in AI & Why Startups Have Become Too Soft; We Need a Spiritual Reform with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO @ Replit

Amjad Masad · Mar 10, 2023

Equality of access — anyone in the world being able to participate in the software economy — will be a huge positive development

38:38 20VC: Why AI Will Lead to Thousands of Billionaires and Elon Musk's, Will TikTok Be Banned and How Facebook Should Be Investing in AI & Why Startups Have Become Too Soft; We Need a Spiritual Reform with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO @ Replit

Jonathan Ross · Feb 17, 2025

Prompt engineering will unlock a huge swath of human society as builders, potentially turning the 1.3-1.4 billion people in Africa into potential entrepreneurs

Hardware engineering required arcane, hard-to-obtain knowledge and software engineering required self-teaching, but language is something people already know and requires learning nothing new

Scope: requires access to tools that let people create applications by speaking

76:09 20VC: NVIDIA vs Groq: The Future of Training vs Inference | Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments: Who Wins | Data, Compute, Models: The Core Bottlenecks in AI & Where Value Will Distribute with Jonathan Ross, Founder @ Groq

Richard Socher · Apr 18, 2025

Young people should learn computer science and programming, and combine it with whatever field they study, even though low-level programming is being commoditized

Programming isn't just a job skill — it's a different way of thinking and understanding the world, so technology feels less like magic and you're empowered to contribute; and law, medicine, chemistry and every field will change over the coming decades

Scope: advice easier to follow for those still able to study; harder once already out of college

39:10 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com

Jonathan Ross · Sep 29, 2025

Coding will stop being a specialist career and become a baseline expectation in every job, the way reading and writing did — making vibe coding an enduring market

Scribes were once a paid profession because literacy was rare; coding is following the same path, and non-coders are already shipping working tools, as with a coffee-chain owner who vibe coded an inventory and supply chain tool and iterated on edge cases from employee feedback

46:08 20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Will Build Their Own Chips | NVIDIA Will Be Worth $10TRN | How to Solve the Energy Required for AI... Nuclear | Why China is Behind the US in the Race for AGI with Jonathan Ross, Groq Founder

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

Everyone should learn to code, because in many non-engineering roles people who can code accomplish more than those who can't

His marketer spent two days coding a swipe-based feedback app she couldn't find in the App Store, which let the team run user experiments a non-coding marketer simply couldn't have run; his best recruiters now write prompts to help screen resumes

Scope: applies across job roles, not just software engineering; he has mixed feelings about the term 'vibe coding' itself

13:37 20VC: Andrew NG on The Biggest Bottlenecks in AI | How LLMs Can Be Used as a Geopolitical Weapon | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI? | Is Defensibility Dead in a World of AI? | Will AI Deliver Masa Son's Predictions of 5% GDP Growth?

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

Advising people not to learn to code because AI will automate it will be remembered as some of the worst career advice ever given; as coding gets easier, more people should learn it.

People who can tell a computer precisely what to do become more powerful, and for the foreseeable future coding is the language of precise instruction.

Scope: does not mean writing code by hand — hand-writing code is becoming obsolete

43:23 20VC: Andrew NG on The Biggest Bottlenecks in AI | How LLMs Can Be Used as a Geopolitical Weapon | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI? | Is Defensibility Dead in a World of AI? | Will AI Deliver Masa Son's Predictions of 5% GDP Growth?

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

The distance between having an idea and building it has collapsed, so over the next decade many more people will become software creators rather than just software users

When people can build rather than only use software, they are more empowered, get more done and have more fun

Scope: framed as what he hopes for

60:07 20VC: Andrew NG on The Biggest Bottlenecks in AI | How LLMs Can Be Used as a Geopolitical Weapon | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI? | Is Defensibility Dead in a World of AI? | Will AI Deliver Masa Son's Predictions of 5% GDP Growth?

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

Educational institutions should embrace AI, update curricula, and teach every student to code

Students will live in a world where they use AI to help them, so they must be taught to do that

52:43 Schools must teach every student to code and use ai

Cem Kansu · Jun 20, 2025

Anyone entering product today should learn AI tools inside out and build AI-first, even though it currently feels artificial and underpowered

It mirrors the mobile-first bet around 2012, which felt stupid when only 1% of users were on mobile but proved right within three years; whoever can harness these tools to build product will come out ahead

17:07 Learn ai tools and build ai first mirrors past platform shifts