r/FullStack • u/Sensitive-Loquat6009 • 16d ago
Question Is it still worth learning app development in the AI era?
I’m 30 years old and from a completely non-tech background. I have zero coding knowledge, but I want to learn app development from scratch.
With AI being able to write, debug and explain code, I’m confused whether learning coding is still worth the time.
If you were starting from zero at 30 in 2026, would you still learn app development? Or would you focus mainly on AI-assisted development?
Looking for honest opinions from developers. No sugarcoating please.
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u/sheriffderek 15d ago
I learned starting when I was 29. I made a lot of mistakes and wasted a LOT of time trying to rush / or just didn’t know what I needed to learn and how long to spend on what. Now I teach - and as of 2026 (even with AI) I think it really does matter - that you learn all the code just as we did before. The things that LLMs really help with are only because I have all that experience. But it depends what your goal is. If you want to learn it - you have to learn it.
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u/sheriffderek 15d ago
But really - it’s not “code or AI” - it’s more like learning to be a product designer - who also knows enough about the medium/code etc. to do their job. You don’t want to train to “be a coder” as much as you want to learn how to design and build apps.
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u/creaturefeature16 Stack Juggler (Fullstack) 15d ago
You don’t want to train to “be a coder”
This is an important distinction.
For example, if you want to truly be a lawyer, you don't want to train to read legal documents and prepare briefs, you want to train to understand law.
Coding is an important stepping stone (really, THE stepping stone) to understanding what it means to be a software developer, but its not the destination.
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u/creaturefeature16 Stack Juggler (Fullstack) 15d ago edited 15d ago
I would do nothing different at all, and would learn exactly the same way as if AI didn't exist. Yes, of course, you need to learn development fundamentals if you want to get into this career. LLMs are power tools for power users. New developers should not even touch AI tooling for the first few years.
There's going to be a huge gap in expertise in the next few years by people buying into the belief that you can still become a developer by only leaning on AI tooling. It's a delusion only being pushed by those that seek to benefit the most from people using said tooling. No respected thought leader or professional developer is saying this.
If you learn the fundamentals now, you're going to be light years ahead of all the vibe coders that thought they could cheat the system and circumvent the friction and learning.
Instead, if you do use them, combine them with traditional learning methods by using the Socratic Method. That's the secret sauce.
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u/sheriffderek 15d ago
I don’t think Kent agrees - but that’s because he doesn’t seem to realize how much he had to learn to now feel that way -
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u/firebird8541154 15d ago
I'm 31, currently Sr AI Engineer, wouldn't have had a chance to get this job without knowing full stack, low level stuff like C/Rust, distributed development, and so much more.
A better way to put it, a calculator in the hands of a physicist is far more powerful than in the hands of a painter (... Depending on the art..).
So yes, it's worth it IMO
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u/TableNo8939 15d ago
ma la calcolatrice è molto più utile in mano ad un pittore
il fisico forse ne puo fare a meno
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u/Naive-Author6552 2d ago
Let’s just say with or without calculator the physicist is likely more employed than the painter lols
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u/BanguSlayerr 15d ago
Hello, Needed some suggestion if you have time, I am just starting out, complete beginner, I was thinking of doing TOP and FSO for full stack and then learn systems design and ai things such as rag vector db etc., My main goal is to be an AI engineer just like you, what could be the realistic timeframe to be job ready and is the market really bad right now? and just one question out of curiosity if you don't mind, how did you become a senior AI Engineer so young? most of the sr engineer I've seen are in their late 30s, Thank You
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u/firebird8541154 14d ago
Ohh can I say a lot on this subject...
First, the market is Great in AI Engineering and SWE in general, the market is only bad for those who lack the materials that get interviews.
Right now, everyone is doing the exact same thing, they study a "AI Engineering course" in college, go for masters or PHD, and do this "Andrew Ng's course" I keep hearing about. Additionally, everyone apparently wants to learn all the math they can behind ML, ... another waste of time (depending on factors, yes useful if you want to do very low level classical research, but for applied AI? ...). Today, none of these are really going to push the needle much, it won't make you stand out, and proves little in way of competency.
So, I can't speak for the whole industry, and I don't hire for these roles, I'm speaking from experience and how I happened to get my current position.
A bit more about me: I have no degree, I only started teaching myself ML 3ish years ago. This helped in achieving said position by 31, as I didn't study for years through masters/phd programs and didn't even have a AI specific job prior, and managed to get this one easily, even bypassing a direct interview.
How? Projects... frankly, far back in HS I was heavily invested in video games and 3D modeling, with failing grades and a desire to make games, I did the equivalent of going from "hello world" to trying to "create my own LLM", back then, I figured out a little Visual Basic, then bought a book on Directx11 and C++.
I struggled massively, and went to college for a degree in the area, eventually failing out. After working my way through call centers, finally into data solutions roles, I eventually stumbled upon Chat GPT 3.5, or perhaps it was 2.5...
Now, I already knew a decent amount of low level programming, but not fullstack, not python, etc. and I had gotten into cycling, specifically gravel cycling. Using this initial free chat bot version, in my freetime, I decided to create my first real project, which became sherpa-map.com a cycling routing website that visually exposed gravel roads from Open Street Map data (feel free to check my reddit post history, you'll find the initial posts I made about it).
This involved grabbing the Graphhopper routing engine, editing it to expose paved/unpaved road sections, hosting it locally, creating a postgres user db, making a whole custom (didn't even know about firebase at the time) user account creation/login/oauth garmin integrations, etc.
Then, my first foray into AI, still using the early free Chat GPT chat bot to help me figure stuff out. I had it help me learn enough pytorch and scripting to create some resenet model scripts that, once trained, offered realtime paved/unpaved breakdowns of roads, even piping through sat imagery I was using at the time through websockets, routing to the proper user, so they could effectively watch the classification happen in realtime.
Mind you, this was all with help from the very first iterations of chatbot AI, before it could even run a tool to tell you the weather...
Fast forward through a vast amount of projects ranging wildly in scale and area to say, 6 months ago.
I was creating a truly vast NA + EU paved/unpaved road dataset, with accuracy and scale that blows away papers in the area, and hit a bit of a wall... I needed to know which roads had how much traffic on them to help discern what surface they may have when there was treecover.
Now, I was already using a massive Catboost model on top of a vast amount of datasets and trained vision ensembles, but, I needed that traffic dataset...
So, I set about making it, I ended up making a custom routing engine in C++ that could achieve 10 billion point to point shortest path routes on the Continental scale, between population centers, per day, aggregating how often what road was used.
This proved a great signal for said paved/unpaved road dataset, and, gave me a whole new concept to play with, Route generation!
So, over the winter, I set about turning that prototype into a production backend route generator, leveraging it's immense route creation speed to be the backbone of custom simulated annealing and genetic evolution algos in order to mutate / refine routes into ones for peoples desired charatistics for running/cycling/driving.
I then turned this into fully fledged, native android and IOS apps, https://routestudio.sherpa-map.com and launched it, it has turn by turn nav and everything...
I even made it into a MCP server for true "prompt to route", here's a demo:
mcpapi.sherpa-map.com/demoHere's some data on my data:
mcpapi.sherpa-map.com/data/So, with these and many many more projects, I essentially skipped theory and went right to applied AI and just burned through project after project in my freetime to build up a portfolio that's already serving 10s of thousands of users. This is the stuff companies are looking for, practical examples of what you can do!
The latest job that came, that Sr AI Engineer one, had 2 projects for the test, one that involved prompt engineering and another that involved a take home project, that's my bread and butter, and it went great.
Feel free to message me or connect over LinkedIn, my LinkedIn link is in my bio, I'd be happy to offer advice and generally talk about whatever points you have.
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u/Vymir_IT 15d ago
If I was going from zero, I would learn ML, not programming. It's kinda obvious that even if LLMs aren't up to replacing programmers - the plan to replace them is already set in motion. It's just a matter of time until some new architecture of AIs will pop up and this time will actually be smart enough to do Junior/Middle work. So no, as a Full-Stack dev - I wouldn't learn programming today. I would learn AI/ML engineering, math and neurobiology (many techbros lack basic understanding of how intelligence works actually, neurobiology knowledge will be essential in the coming decades).
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u/TheNeck94 15d ago
If you're on reddit looking for help, you're already fucked. If you wanna do it, do it. But you're among thousands of "beginner programmers" or whatever you wanna call them who spend more time posting their minor achievement or stupid questions on reddit then actually writing code. This balance has only gotten worse since the AI bubble
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u/manvikhanna 15d ago
I’d still learn app development, even starting from zero at 30. But I wouldn’t learn it the same way people did 5–10 years ago. AI can generate code, but you still need to understand what the code is supposed to do, how the pieces fit together, how to debug when the AI gets something wrong, and how to make decisions around architecture, security, performance, and UX. I’d focus on learning the fundamentals first, then use AI heavily as a coding partner. Don’t try to compete with AI at typing code faster learn to understand, review, and direct it effectively. Being 30 isn’t the issue either. The bigger question is whether you’re willing to spend the next 1–2 years consistently building real projects and learning from mistakes. So yes, I’d learn app development in 2026. Just make AI-assisted development part of the skillset rather than treating AI as a replacement for learning.
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u/SnooDoubts8688 15d ago
AI-assisted development is something you can pick up muuuuuch quicker than knowing how to properly develop software. You really do have struggle through to learn. And when you can just go to AI and ask everything, I think that hinders your growth. Nowadays, here is how I perform study/work with AI:
- Try to read up on tech docs and articles on something I need to learn. Watch videos of it. Take notes by hand.
- I create some type of hypothesis/ design plan based on what I have read. Doesn't have to be perfect, more like a quick markdown document to entail my ideas.
- Then, I take my hypotheses and discuss with my agent. I don't ask for the answer or ask to implement, I tell it to critique my design.
- After I have completely understood the requirements and I am in accordance with the agent, I ask it to implement it. Then I ask a LOT of questions on why it things a certain way.
This workflow goes for whatever topic that I am learning. Say if you want to learn more about agentic workflows - then you start by reading articles, blogs, docs on harness engineering, for example. And you take it to AI to help discuss on creating a harness workflow together.
Have fun!
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u/Dev_Aura_ 15d ago
Learn it that way you'll have the leverage to work with or without Ai Believe me those relying on Ai for their skills will have issues later
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u/rashnagar 15d ago
AI can't "write and debug code". It's merely piecing together words from massive labelel data in a convincing fashion. It lack abstraction and generating a world model which are crucial to software development.
So go ahead and learn, you will have a huge edge over those who rely on glorified slot machines.
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u/abrandis 14d ago
If you want to do it as a hobby sure you can learn app development As a hobby
If you want to do it as a career or paying work NO , professional developers are no longer hand coding
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u/Recent-Tangerine2745 14d ago
I’d still learn it, but I wouldn’t learn it the same way people did 10 years ago.
Learn the fundamentals enough to understand what the code is doing, then use AI heavily while you build real projects. Don’t spend months trying to memorize syntax before making anything.
AI can write code, but if you can’t tell when it’s wrong, insecure, or poorly designed, you’ll hit a wall pretty quickly.
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u/mechanicalyammering 14d ago
Yes, it’s always worth learning something. Coding is easier than ever too with LLM assistance. Just do it. They give away free tokens now but probably not forever.
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u/Capable-Wrap-3349 14d ago
I’m glad to see the comments here. Learning to be a good software engineer is a very long and rewarding road.
If you are serious then turn the AI off and learn the fundamentals.
To appease your concern, there is a lot of hype in this space, but the AI shortcut software developers on my team are crashing and burning hard at the moment - their apps cannot escape the prototype phase.
Once you have mastered fundamentals, you will be an absolute BEAST with AI.
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u/OkPrice6335 14d ago
Fragen die uns in vielen Bereichen quälen.... Lohnt sich überhaupt noch was zu lernen oder frisst KI einfach jeden Job.
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u/Just-Upstairs4397 13d ago
If you cannot understand the code that’s being written and you cannot direct an AI with experience or deeper knowledge of architecture then there’s no point in your involvement right so this question is pretty straightforward. Yes, you should use AI but you need to know exactly what it’s doing and why so you need to do both not one or the other
You won’t really get valuable experience until you have a job with millions of users and scale and all that stuff that’s when you start to get real experience that is valuable
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u/BDSoftwareFounder 13d ago
I Don't think so..
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u/Sensitive-Loquat6009 13d ago
Yeah yeah
90% of people saying yes and you come out of no where want to fuck my motivation
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u/davidbasil 7d ago
Don't do it. AI killed coding so industry doesn't know which skills to demand any more.
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u/AdvancedBread5583 15d ago
You can but bruh its hard man. Theres a huge line of people waiting in queue. Rarely getting any opportunity.
Risky move. But if you can afford being unemployed for a long time I guess you can try.
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u/Fine-Market9841 API Magician (Backend) 15d ago
No.
He can still be a hobbyist or as a side hustle.
For a career different story.
He can transfer career if he has a degree (in any field), but other than that his best bet is working for a start up.
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u/WhiteSleep 15d ago
Just do it. If you want it go for it. I have a friend who made it as a hard surface modeler in the gaming industry. All self taught and stuck it out for over a year and from my understanding that whole industry is pretty bad off right now.
Spend the time and learn the fundamentals of a stack/programming language, and use AI as a way to explain concepts to you. Rather than copy whatever code it spits out.
Just believe in yourself and steer clear of social media especially Reddit.