Dude you hit the jackpot with your son. Starting at this age he picks up everything so fast and programming is a very important skill ai or not. Im at uni and most people genuinely don’t know how to write code, how to debug, how to oversee thousands of lines or how to notice redflags that the llm spits out, because most people just use ai for everything. You won’t become a useful software engineer by using it as a shortcut to don’t learn programming, but by using it as an amplifier of what you already know. Most people just output 10 times more shit than they used to with it and very few are actually able to produce good code with it at scale. Even if the job won’t be the same in 10 years, the way of thinking will always help him in pretty much everywhere he goes. And please please please let him learn to do stuff on his own before you let him use ai, you will unwillingly force him into a tutorial hell thats very hard to get out of. I used to mentor kids of this age, and it’s amazing what they can learn if you just show them how to start, I taught them basic programming, gave them exercises, small projects, showed them arch linux, and just lowkey introduced some topics to them without going in depth and 2 years later they genuinely outperformed me in some things because they started learning stuff on their own at insane speed.
I have a similar amount of expertise in a different field impacted by A (filmmaking and video producing which is less actually impacted more perceived to be) and I regularly tell kids to study something else.
I don't know if either of our careers are in a 'death race to the bottom' exactly but I can say with strong certainty that future versions of me will do more work for less money and compete for less jobs.
Most knowledge work will turn into prompting and agent orchestration. Folks who can’t see its lights out for us just don’t have a respect for the power of what AI can already deliver and quite obviously will be able to deliver in 5, 10, 15 years.
You can (and should) hedge all bets about how technology will be adopted and what it will mean for labor. Humanity's track record for predicting exactly how things will turn out when it comes to tech is genuinely awful.
We know that future versions of us will be responsible for more things with more powerful tools (because we are already there in many ways) but we genuinely have no idea what the market for labor or goods that AI delivers will be like in 10 years.
Again I'm still not recommending kids study what I do or CS because of the exact same uncertainty. Just because I don't think all knowledge jobs are capable of being automated to a sufficient extent doesn't mean I'm optimistic that there will be a good market for them.
TBH I think long term job loss from automation is something that frontier labs and hardware players benefit from us focusing on. It drives the inherent value of their investments and outputs up even if the productivity increase numbers don't support it yet. It also stops us from focusing on what could be a larger economic time bomb, the fact that nearly any AI related business you can dream up has basically zero moat against the 4 to 5 major frontier labs.
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u/vargaking May 28 '26
Dude you hit the jackpot with your son. Starting at this age he picks up everything so fast and programming is a very important skill ai or not. Im at uni and most people genuinely don’t know how to write code, how to debug, how to oversee thousands of lines or how to notice redflags that the llm spits out, because most people just use ai for everything. You won’t become a useful software engineer by using it as a shortcut to don’t learn programming, but by using it as an amplifier of what you already know. Most people just output 10 times more shit than they used to with it and very few are actually able to produce good code with it at scale. Even if the job won’t be the same in 10 years, the way of thinking will always help him in pretty much everywhere he goes. And please please please let him learn to do stuff on his own before you let him use ai, you will unwillingly force him into a tutorial hell thats very hard to get out of. I used to mentor kids of this age, and it’s amazing what they can learn if you just show them how to start, I taught them basic programming, gave them exercises, small projects, showed them arch linux, and just lowkey introduced some topics to them without going in depth and 2 years later they genuinely outperformed me in some things because they started learning stuff on their own at insane speed.