Bob Belderbos: Why Learn to Code If AI Can Code? 6 Reasons

Useful takeaways from this story.

They've run it both before and after Cursor and Claude Code arrived, and enrollment basically doubled.

Decomposition, naming the sub-problems, deciding what data structure the algorithm needs.

It turns out that more people, not less, want to learn to code now that AI can write it.

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The useful part

They've run it both before and after Cursor and Claude Code arrived, and enrollment basically doubled. It turns out that more people, not less, want to learn to code now that AI can write it. Decomposition, naming the sub-problems, deciding what data structure the algorithm needs.

How it works

Without foundations, you can't catch AI's bad decisions Piech says he constantly ships with AI, and he's explicit about why it works for him: he already knows architecture.
I see this all the time working with LLMs: happy path and call it done.
That is the problem solving part you carry into every language and every tool, including AI.
Strip that away and the model starts making poor structural calls you often only notice later on in the app's lifecycle.

What to take from it

The half worth building is the one that transfers: problem solving.

Details worth keeping

Why learn the thing the machine can now do almost flawlessly? At that point you really need to understand the architecture underneath. This is the whole argument for keeping fundamentals.

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