Should I still study CS? I answered by building a company

OP here.

I teach A-level CS in the UK. Students want to know if CS is still useful to study and whether they should still learn to code. I tried to create a large system to answer that question, by not writing any code myself and just using AI.

7 months later and it became a real company printing real photo books (https://www.rgbloom.com/). It's over 100kloc and the same again in tests. All I've manually coded was changing less than a dozen CSS values and tweaking one JavaScript string. But over 600 Claude Code sessions I've written over 6,700 prompts and roughly 250k words.

I've concluded that fewer and fewer projects need us humans to code them. But the more we know about CS fundamentals, and the more coding we've done and problems we've solved, the better the systems we can create with AI. I'd been coding for decades before this, and think that's the only reason it worked for me.

I expect many of you have found the same thing.

There's more technical details and some example prompts etc over at https://www.computingatschool.org.uk/forum-news-blogs/2026/o... - a post I wrote for UK computing teachers.

Happy to answer any questions!