July 6, 2026
Is there any point to learn to code in the age of vibe coding?
Literally no one is uttering what we thought were the immortal lines “learn to code,” right? I don't think that sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley
I'm the founder of Val Town, a "Silicon Valley startup" for writing and deploying code, and I still believe everyone should learn to code.
Sam is right that “learn to code” is no longer trotted out as a quick path out of poverty. The ability to string together two lines of JavaScript no longer guarantees you a 6-figure-salary.
This is also true of math, literature, science, or any of the liberal arts. Like those, coding is worthwhile to learn on educational grounds, not merely vocational ones.
I grew up hating math. I stumbled into an after-school program that taught programming. Through it, I fell in love with math, and excelled at it beyond my wildest dreams.
Later, I learned this experience masterminded by a math & education researcher named Seymour Papert. He wanted children to learn math like they learn to speak: through exploration instead of instruction. He started from the assumption that we all know it’s impossible to be congenitally “bad at French”: if you grow up in France, you’ll learn it. So Papert tried to create “Mathland”, a place where anyone could grow up “speaking math.”
The Mathland he created was the LOGO programming language, where you can draw pictures by giving instructions to a turtle on the screen with ink on its feet. I recently made a version of it you can try out online. Can you figure out how to draw a circle?
Through learning to program, I learned so many meta-skills, like debugging, composition, and logic. Most importantly, I learned that there’s literally nothing that cannot be learned. These meta-learnings of programming may explain the unreasonable competence (and arrogance) of computer scientists: why we think we can solve all the world’s problems – even those far outside our original domains.
Coding is a delightful activity that combines the creativity of writing with the precision of mathematics and the instant feedback loops of a video game. It helps you sharpen your desires into precise language that computers can carry out.
It’s remarkably close to casting spells. I think of Hermione correcting Ron – "it's levi-O-sa” – as a good model of what it’s like learning the arcane syntax of code. But once you master that, “You are a wizard, Harry.” You can encode what you imagine into an arcane language that a computer will make real. We all can be wizards.
LLMs can write English as well as they can write code, yet we have no fear for the relevance of humanities. The same intuition holds true for code.
Many dismiss code in the same way they dismiss legalese as inscrutable, tedious details. But like law, code is what our world runs on, and an elegant line of code can literally change the world. Think of e=mc2 or “we hold these truths to be self-evident” if you doubt the power and majesty of precise formal language.
And finally, programming is simply fun. It's a joy. My calling in life is to spread the joy of programming, so if you have any inkling of interest in learning to code yourself, shoot me an email – [email protected].
The dream of universal code literacy – or the "real computer revolution” – lives on, even in the age of LLMs.