Learning to code is still worthwhile
Steve Krouse makes the case I still buy: learning to code is less a guaranteed career coupon now and more a literacy for thinking precisely with computers. The strongest angle is educational, not nostalgic. Code teaches decomposition, feedback loops, debugging, abstraction, and the habit of turning a blurry desire into an executable system.
The Hacker News thread adds the necessary cold water. Most production programming is craft and maintenance, not pure art, and time spent learning code competes with every other skill. That actually sharpens the case in the AI era: if tools can generate more code than ever, the scarce skill is understanding enough to steer, inspect, repair, and refuse the output. You do not learn programming to beat the machine at typing; you learn it so the machine is not the only one in the room with a model of the work.