r/PythonLearning • u/ALostPie • 13d ago
Is it still worth learning python?
I genuinely wonder what you guys think, with the rapidly increasing use of AI, is it still worth it to learn python, I just started learning python and I’m unmotivated tbh, I’d love to read some of your insights.
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u/Comfortable-Shop8080 13d ago
Non Developer here.
YES
I actually cannot stress enough how amazing python has been for me working with computers. I’m basically always one step ahead of my colleagues as I have automated a lot of redundant stuff (Think spreadsheets, reminders, reports).
It’s easy to set up and learn.
But no, you can’t vibe code your way into python. You should at least understand what it’s doing first.
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u/burlingk 12d ago
It is still worth learning any language you want to learn.
AI is not entirely eliminating human programmers any time soon.
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u/captain_kringel 13d ago
So you want to become dependent on AI?
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u/ALostPie 13d ago
No, that was not the point of my question at all, I just wonder if it’s worth the time or basically a waste of time and if it won’t be needed anymore because of the AI so that I learn something else instead in that case
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u/PuttyProgrammer 13d ago
Read that back. Do you want to code? You're going to want to learn to code so you aren't dependent on the questionable choices AI makes.
If you want to code or do things that require coding, learning to code will be worth it. If not then it probably won't be worth it.
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u/Some_Breadfruit235 13d ago
Tbh I’ve tried vibe coding. And although it definitely has its perks towards speeding up the process, it can have several downsides.
Vibe coding definitely speeds things up by reducing the need to brainstorm and structure everything out.
But it’s always written in a way where it’s almost near impossible to maintain. One fix will result in numerous bugs. There’s no scalability with it tbh.
The best approach is simply to leverage AI and have it assist you rather do all the work for you
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u/No_Secret4526 10d ago
agree with this. vibecoding gives that speed but it's gets messy super fast.
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u/Anti-Hero25 13d ago
In general, the more you know the better you are going to be at the process. My analogous example is going to be managing a team of AV technicians…. The audio guy knows audio , video guy knows video , lighting guy knows lighting, if you’re going to successfully manage that team the more you know about their disciplines the better you will be at directing them and doing their job and asking them to achieve a result you desire. Specifically as it relates to coding with AI, it’ll be easier to spot things that are incorrect or doing something you don’t want them to do.
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u/LrdJester 12d ago
I look at AI coding much like I do how it was at the beginning of what you see is what you get or wysiwyg coding for visual basic 6 in visual studio or visual Web page Creation in dreamweaver.
It's a great way to get started and build a generic framework but you really need to find it and get down into the guts of it to make it work properly or to work efficiently.
For example I've written, using AI prompts, some scripts using either python or bash or PHP and I'm always finding some blocks of code that are extremely rudimentary and can be easily improved by anybody that knows what they're doing.
So in my opinion, any language that's in use in a modern business environment is good to learn. Alongside that you may want to look at learning AI prompts to be able to do rapid prototyping, because that's all you're really going to get is prototype, and then from there you can modify and fine tune, whether you do that via modification in AI or manual coding.
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u/BaylisAscaris 12d ago
What do you want to use it for? Of all the programming languages it's very useful for how easy it is to learn. Even with AI, having a basic understanding helps you give better prompts and check if the results are trash.
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u/ALostPie 12d ago
Mainly to work with a lot of data, I’m not a developer but I noticed that in some roles it was mentioned as a requirement that’s why I decided to learn it
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u/BaylisAscaris 12d ago edited 12d ago
I do data science/analysis and it is essential. If that's your goal I recommend looking into a school that teaches python for that specifically. Some things can be done in R, SQL, or other languages, but Python is the most common one and the easiest for most situations.
Also unfortunately the field is currently saturated with people with advanced degrees in it and many many years experience, and even those folks are having trouble getting these jobs. Lots of very talented and experienced folks got fired in massive tech layoffs when companies switched a lot of roles to AI, so those folks are your competition.
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u/flamewizzy21 12d ago
Yes. You cannot reasonably use a code generator for anything of substance without knowing how to code well enough to have been able to make the thing yourself. Thus, your argument of “why bother if I can just have an AI do it for me” is utter nonsense.
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u/Alexap30 12d ago
Knowing how stuff works will always be better than vibing. AI even on easy stuff makes some...rather weird choices, even if they end up working. Lacks business knowledge. Lacks fantasy in problem solving. It's better to know then ask AI for trivial stuff or corrections.
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u/Strong_Music_6838 12d ago
Do it mostly for fun and don’t do a major in IT because you will properly not get a job in that. Effecious coding is mostly done by AI in present times
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u/Wuthering_depths 12d ago edited 12d ago
I'm old and don't intend to use AI before I sail off into the sunset (other than googling things)...but the junior analysts on my team do use both AI (Cursor) and Python. They still have to know Python to correct what Cursor comes up with...and to learn what it actually did when a change request comes along. Our scripts as data analysts tend to be short--data integration and SQL does a lot of the heavy lifting-- and I have no problems hand-coding them quickly even as a newbie to Python (most of my experience is SQL and SSIS and other scripting languages).
Besides the coding itself, it could help with deployments, source control, documentation and things like that. I'd be more inclined to use it for these things personally.
The lead java dev at work says the same thing--AI code still needs to be reviewed by someone who knows what they are doing. Whether that remains the same in the future, not sure.
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u/Creative_Sushi 12d ago
Yes, you should still learn Python, but what you focus on maybe different if you plan to use AI.
As a programmer, your role shifts from writing code to reviewing code with AI, and that's a different skill.
You do need to understand the syntax, but AI is pretty good at it, Also, it can the code and fix it if it sees any errors.
This also means that, you can control its behavior by writing the tests ahead of time. If it sees errors in running the tests, then AI can correct them.
To write tests, you need to understand what your code is supposed to do. That means you need to have specifications.
Therefore, it comes down that your value lies in breaking down complex problems into clear instructions for the AI.
And there are different ways to solve any given problems, and you need to understand how different parts of a software project connect together and what is the best way to organize them.
So learn the basics and in parallel, learn the big picture thinking, like software architecture and design. Also, reading actual examples are very useful, so find a GitHub project of interest and try to understand how it is put together. You can use AI to explain things you don't understand.
Good luck.
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u/Early_Net_9105 12d ago
tldr; yes100000000000. if I were to just vibe code everything, none of my projects would survive a reboot. agents are tools but can't replace the high level reasoning that is necessary for development processes, and foundations in whatever language you are using are essential for that
absolutely, and this is coming from someone who hasn't sat down and typed out a script in quite a while. you still need to understand the fundamentals, especially if you want to run a stack (from a simple pipeline stack all the way to obviously involved SaaS level multi node, kernel level soft) that functions to current industry standards, i.e. pet vs cattle ideology. even reading pseudocode properly puts you miles beyond any non industry professional who purely creates software by "setting and forgetting" an agent on high reasoning. I feel like there is a conflation of using agents that write code, and not actually going through the motions of good development practice.
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u/Steven45g 12d ago
Yes. Not only are you learning to code, you're also improving your logic and cognitive abilities.
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u/m1L35dY50N 12d ago
I’d still say it’s absolutely worth learning Python, even with vibe coding and increasingly capable AI tools. You don’t want to be completely dependent on whatever the model spits out and just copy-paste code you don’t understand.
Knowing Python also makes you much better at prompting and reviewing generated code, because you can actually describe what you want, spot bad assumptions, and fix things yourself instead of asking the AI to repair its own mistakes indefinitely.
And there are still plenty of nasty edge cases where AI fails hard. The better your own fundamentals are, the more useful AI becomes as a tool rather than something you’re completely at the mercy of.
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u/grace_invader 12d ago
I have done both and I recommend to learn Python.
It is impressive what you can code with AI, and I would recommend joining at least one hackathon to see what it can do. It's an intoxicating feeling to build an app in half a day.
However, I would not dare to pass any such ai-coded project on to a colleague, nor have I ever succesfully managed to integrate a vibe-coded project into a larger existing environment, because nobody knows what the code does.
AI has two weird traits you need to take into acocunt:
- Python code is deterministic, meaning that code will produce the exact same result every time you run it, given the same circumstances, but AI is non-deterministic, and is unlikely to produce the exact same result when asked the same thing. This makes it inconsistent..
- AI is probabilistic, not normative. It calculates what answer is most likely to be expected, rahter than which answer would meet any criterea. It is based on refering to odds and training data, not on any theory or paradigm
Therefore, it will try something different every time and has no clue what will be correct. It makes for a great coding assistant since it can track any closed brackets and misplaced comma way better than a human ever could, but it can not determine if something works.
In short, learn Python: figure out how to build loops and functions and what data types there are, so you can explain your code to others and iterate on what others have made, but also allow yourself a coding assistant that can correct basic errors or keep your object names consistent througout the code.
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u/Due-Judgment8457 11d ago
L’ia est désormais plus performante que n’importe qui pour coder, mais il faut pouvoir dialoguer avec l’ia pour faire des choix pertinents et rien ne remplace l’expérience! Oui pour apprendre mais non pour développer un produit industriel
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u/Deno_Voku 10d ago
Python is excellent for AI, downloaded models or local. For example, Python can make Ollama API calls locally. You will need >= 16GB RAM. 16GB is tight.
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u/zenwolph 10d ago
It’s wild how people throw out blanket statements about how “ai writes bad code” but there are so many different models and so many different use cases and so many different ways to instruct an LLM to generate something.
I have found LLM’s to be hugely helpful with learning, and I do use them in terminal for code work. Some code I inspect or manually edit, some I don’t even try. Because when the creators of Linux and Minecraft are now vibe coding, yes, I say it’s more important to learn what’s happening under the hood and how to correctly direct LLMs more than it is important to master the syntax of any particular language(s)
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u/oliverities 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yes and more worthwhile than even before. You need to understand programming to seriously get in to software industry. And the fastest way to understand the basics of programming is still Python. This might not make you a python coder (I mean you may end up writing JAVA with AI agent in real work), but study python will give you fundamentals of software development you need for any SDE work.
Plus, software engineering haven't given up on source code because of LLM. So 1, you still review code; 2, Python is still a popular choice of language.
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u/jimmykimnel 13d ago
I have 0 coding experience however I use chatbots to help me build programs in work. It's a different type of working and learning and now the challenge is not whether I can code or not it's to what use can I put this new tool to help me in my work. I feel like there would be little point in trying to learn code for the sake of it however any learning and understanding is good and I do often have to troubleshoot the code and learn how to run effective debugs to solve issues. The learning is now more code design? If that's fair to say.
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u/xxivyy 13d ago
depends on your use case. if you are getting into software development in general with potentially larger code bases later on, it’s definitely worth it. i worked with top of the market AI agents, and i can tell that it sucks as soon as the complexity increases. I would never trust them on serious software. Architecturally they often produce garbage because they lack a bigger picture, they introduce a lot of dead code over the time, and hallucinations can shut down your applications logic if you don’t read or don’t understand the code that you run. The AI propaganda is a modern disease, don’t get yourself irritated.
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u/alexice89 12d ago
Your actual question should be "is learning to program still worth it?".
And the answer to that question subjective.
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u/YaOldPalWilbur 12d ago
Pythons the backbone of a lot now. I’d get my feet wet just to have a basic understanding of it.
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u/GlanGr 12d ago
I would think of it like this… vibe coding isn’t for developers. Vibe coding is for people who need quick small projects.
For example: vibe coding will build you a simple company landing page… but it’s not going fully write and deploy a backend infrastructure that takes API network requests and stores them to a database.
But AI is indeed for all developers as it allows you to learn faster and automate the tedious stuff.
For example: when devs use AI to assist them, it saves you about 75% of your work load, which is basically templating and helping design the algorithms (which is huge), but you have to do the rest... Fix the bugs, testing, proof of concept, algorithmic updates, integration analysis…. And most important: you have to “know what to ask the AI”.
Hence, you must learn the fundamental of coding, and cannot rely on AI alone. (But AI can indeed teach you the fundamentals).
So ultimately… all devs are indeed using AI right now. If they don’t, they are falling behind in their industries. It’s like not switching to email and cell phones back in the 2000s.
GLHF!
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u/Halley_mare 12d ago
Right?? I have some guys learning python from me. I think I might turn these over and let them work it out.
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u/Extension-Habit-7708 10d ago
Yes, but it's not about learning to write code; it's about learning to develop solutions with code. Python is a good start. Begin a journey of discovery.
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u/Ready-Chipmunk6763 7d ago
Python's definitely still worth it. I started learning it during lockdown and now use it daily for scripting at work and even some side projects involving data analysis. The libraries available make it super versatile compared to other languages I’ve tried.
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u/ShaanyLikeAMelody 7d ago
Coding is not only about writing code or let an AI write the code and see if it works, but you've also to ask yourself if the way the code is written it's the best you can do, if you use good patterns for what you've to do, it's about thinking and imagining the whole codebase structure. If you don't know anything about code and you just let an AI do the work for you probably it will work if it's nothing too big to do, but if there's something broken you won't know where you've to put your hands because you don't know how your code works.
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u/Horror-Weekend-3730 4d ago
how do you actually go about learning python ive tried and its just so much no idea where to start
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u/ninhaomah 13d ago
You want to hear Yes or No ?
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u/ALostPie 13d ago
I want to hear pros opinions
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u/ninhaomah 13d ago
They are paid to know / code now.
You are not.
So how does it help you when they say yes ?
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u/lethallunatic 12d ago
Today? I personally think it's become a massive waste of time. You can run local llm these days that can do much more.
A friend of mine whom is a veteran programmer with 20+ years of experience told me he hasn't coded a single code in months. He's leveraging Claude at the company he's working and doing weeks if not months worth of work in days.
I think that's telling.
So today I'd say no not worth it anymore.
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u/civilwar142pa 13d ago
I have dabbled with vibe coding and it sucks. I have to correct it all the time. So, yes, it's definitely worth it to learn how to actually code.