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Comment by kuboble | Hacker News Reader

I think in order to be a productive programmer with Claude you still need to understand what you are doing.

Learning to code is a must. You need to know what is possible or easy to know how much you can ask.

What will be less important is to keep your sword sharp.

I notice that if code less for some time I do more one-off errors, copy/paste mistakes etc. With llm keeping the coding skill warm is less important but I cannot imagine doing my work - even with Fable if I didn't know how to do it without him

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To be clear: I don't envision a scenario where people who are completely unable to code will come out of nowhere, and make a career out of prompting claude to write software without ever learning to code. What I am saying is that the threshold of what constitutes "good enough" coding skill has shifted down, and those people who already knew how to code now have a certain multiplier on the outcomes they deliver. (this multiplier is high if you measure on low time horizons and gets lower, the longer the time horizons, but the latter doesn't matter in managers' minds). So there will, for a time, be a massive overhang of good-enough coding skill from "old stock", so to speak. For those who do not already know how to code, this make the proposition of learning to code right now uneconomical. If there is already a massive oversupply of grapes in the market, and you're trying to decide which crop to plant, then planting more grapes is economically probably a pretty poor decision. It would be better to plant things that are undersupplied.

> make the proposition of learning to code right now uneconomical

I disagree with this part. The bar of skill you need to write complex now is much lower now, so a new person might very quickly learn just enough to be able to build cool products.

Maybe not operating systems, but useful web apps, browser plugins, productivity tools, programs that solve business needs outside of IT, ETC.

Edit; but if you mean learning to code with the purpose of finding a job as a programmer then I'm more willing to agree.

One might argue that these people will not understand the code they write if they use LLMs. I would counter that with my observation that plenty didn’t understand the code they wrote before LLMs too.

This is the correct take.

Of course you need to know how to code to code. We just no longer need to write code the same, or even reason about the same problems. It's awesome.

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