Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Why you should still learn to code

1 Jun 2025

Watch on YouTube

This is a YouTube video titled "Why you should still learn to code" created on June 1, 2025. The content is a discussion between two speakers about the importance of understanding programming abstractions and the value of learning coding fundamentals despite advances in technology that simplify programming tasks.

When you work with Python today, obviously a lot of things are.
Already abstracted away from you.
And in some sense, someone from 50.
Years ago might already call Python, you just get to explain in English what you want, and now the computer does.
It for you, right?
But I would say as you're building your skills as an engineer, it really helps a lot to understand the abstractions and to be able to peel the layers beneath, right? And so folks will use assembly, for example, if they're really performance optimizing a piece of code in order to build good systems and to understand these things, you certainly want to understand these abstractions of how does networking work, what is.
TCP/IP or what happens with.
This Python code when it gets interpreted. or all of these details.
And I think similarly, we will get.
To a state where, yeah, with no experience at all, you're going to be able to build some pretty cool stuff and to do some pretty amazing work just by explaining what it is that you want. But I think that for quite some.
Time, you really want to be able to think precisely.
About the details, to peel back the abstractions, to be very, very precise about what it is that you want to build and how.