YC CEO Garry Tan & Replit founder Amjad Masad on why learning to code is more important than ever

I've been meeting a lot of, you know, 18, 19 year olds who are freshmen and they're like, well, the code will write itself, right? Like, I don't have to study this stuff anymore. And I'm like, no, that's not true at all. It is far more leverage to know how to code than ever before. And it's actually even more important. And it will make you way more powerful. Like you don't have to be all the way in the weeds on everything. You actually are going to be able to orchestrate this giant army of agents. I think of Mickey Mouse and Fantasia just like, you know, like learning this new magical sort of ability. And like, you know, suddenly all the brooms are walking and talking and dancing and it's this incredible menagerie of being able to build whatever the heck you want, whenever you want, literally from any computer.

I try to come up with the Moore's Law type type thing where it's like the return on learning code is doubling every six months or something like that. So learning code a little bit in 2020 was not that useful because you get blocked. You wouldn't how to deploy something, you wouldn't know how to configure something. Let's go to 2023 with ChatGPT. Learn to code it just a little bit will get you Fairly far because ChatGPT can help you. And then 2024, learn to code a little bit is a massive leverage because we have agents and there's a lot of really cool tools out there like Cursor and others that will get you super far by just like having a little bit of coding and just extend that forward like six months later, going to have even more power. So programmers are just on this massive trajectory of increased power.