Lenny Rachitsky argues kids should still learn to code even with AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. A 10-year-old who spends hours debugging AI output shows why: you need to understand code to catch errors and judge whether the AI got it right.
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Now, the job of the program is to argue with the coding bots, but like, if you don't know how to write the code yourself, you don't know how to evaluate what the coding bots are giving you. Our 10 year old is super into computers and super into programming. He's using Claude and ChatGPT, Copilot and all these things. He loves Vibe coding. It's hysterical, right? Because he's sitting there. It's a 10 year old basically, who spends two hours at dinner arguing with an AI for fun. But what I'm telling him is no, look, you need to still fully understand and learn how to write and understand code. If it doesn't work or if it's not doing what you expect, or it's not fast enough or whatever, you need to be able to understand the results of what the AI is giving you. So again, it's kind of this up leveling of capability where you actually want the depth to be able to go down and be able to understand what the thing is actually doing, even if you're not spending your day actually doing that by hand.