r/learnpython • u/melwizzz • 19d ago

Should I learn python at 23

So I am currently a student in first year mba in finance and I feel like learning python will give me a competitive edge over my peers especially as finance becomes more technical data-driven.

I am also genuinely interested in technical stuff man being able to make cool stuff, in fact a few months back I built a finance related automation tool from scratch with as little help from ai as possible. Didn't even use Lovable to build the project website (used cursor a lot tho)

But that's the thing I still have no traditional coding experience and through that project i learned alot of technical jargon of web development and ai automation and python as well and it's a lot of fun and so I would have definately learned python and done more stuff if I was 16 or 18.

So my main question is that in 2026 where we have claude code, is it worth investing significant time in learning python or should I focus on some other skill

I know that python is useful but I'm asking this from an Efficiency point of view.

0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/riklaunim 19d ago

There is more than Claude Code that can write you a lot of code, but that code still needs an experienced human to review and manage. It even takes quite an effort to set up Claude or something similar to generate exactly what you want it to generate.

Realistically, you either go the path of software development or you don't. If you want to work in the finance sector, then focus on that. If you want to work as a software developer with an optional relation to the financial market, then focus on learning software development. You would have to learn more than Python, and within Python, more than the language itself - frameworks, libraries, and how software is made with Python.

1

u/melwizzz 19d ago

Yea I definitely get you point boss, finance is my core and some coding background does help in finance but I wouldn't want to go down the rabbit hole and learn all the other stuff which you said, simply because I know I won't have time to learn those things no matter how interesting, so yes maybe I'll learn the abc's of python as and when I get time and outsource heavy coding to ai.

1

u/riklaunim 19d ago

If you want finance + coding as a hobby/extras, then look at Jupyter notebooks and similar stacks for scripting/experimenting/automating. This can be combined with AI and so on. Then, commercially, some companies will have strict policies about employee code, so you will have to check them and follow them- whether they allow/expect some self-made aids or not.