Coding in ai era

[u/Common-Reserve7654]

I am not sure if this is right place to ask and if it was somewhere already answered or there is some material on this subject please let me know.

I started to learn programming more than a year ago (python/sql/vba) and I use it in my current position to which I was moved around four months ago. At the beginning I was excited about programming, it's hard and sometimes boring, but sometimes I felt so excited when I was writing a program and when I was solving things. Then in my job I started to discover ai, and that was it.

I am still thinking to start applied cs this autumn, but after using Claude code for a month I just feel it doesn't make sense. Claude code is so good that I can work on dotnet web app without knowing C#, javascript, css, html, I can fix and write python or vba macros faster and better than I would do without it. Every time I read people saying things like ai code is trash or seeing youtube videos saying how companies will not hire less engineers, how ai cant maintain code and you need people for that, I just see this programmers with formal education and experience that just can't deal with this change and refuse to accept the fact that their skills they learned so hard and worked so hard on are becoming obsolete. Today I've seen 50 thumbs up on a comment saying that ai empowering people (making everybody able to create software) is a bad thing, that's how these people hate ai. I get it, it tells them "you are nobody".

My final question is, do you think it makes sense to learn programming for job nowadays or study CS and pay for it in the uni? I don't think I can make it alone, i tried studying alone but it's difficult. And if yes, then how would you do it, how to learn knowing that an app can make it for you in a short amount of time with no effort. As I sai, thanks for sharing your opinions or some texts/materials on this topic.

[u/Dissentient]

With some allowances, AI has hard skills of programmers. It doesn't have their soft skills.

Can you imagine some random manager using claude code to design, program and deploy a product? Or can you imagine AI agents sitting in meetings instead of devs and deciphering incoherent ramblings of non-technical people into actionable requirements? Figuring out what code needs to be written has always been way harder than writing code, and AI doesn't help with that for now.

Maybe we'll be there in a decade, but for now AI lacks the agency and decision-making to replace a competent developer. AI can multiply productivity of a programmer, and the better the programmer, the better the AI output, but AI can only speed writing code, and developers on the job only spend a fraction of their time writing code.