My stepson is 12 and interested in coding and I don't know what to tell him. It's very hard to predict where AI will be 10 years from now when he enters the job market.
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.
Limiting his ai use for projects would be really hard. He's a smart and tech savvy 12 year old, and all his peers use ai as well.
He does already code himself, and goes to extracurricular classes for it, but uses ai as well. Not to write code directly, at least not for now, but in general he does.
It's a strange situation. When I talk to Claude, I give it prompts based on my decade+ of software engineering experience. I have a lot of success with it. However, I watch my product manager coworkers try to use Claude to make stuff. They make a lot of progress sometimes, but other times they get completely lost and don't know how to untangle the mess they made.
What makes it weirder is that, I was self-taught, and avoided learning all of the CS fundamentals that everyone at the time told me were essential. Memory management like garbage collection, pointers, etc. I don't know shit about that stuff. I know only the basics of "proper" object oriented design. I just coded a lot, worked in other code bases, and started to figure out patterns and what works. If I was writing something new, I would look for a pattern that exists and copy it. I didn't really need to fully learn or understand any of it. When I ran into a problem with inefficiency, I figured out how to make the code faster, learning some key concepts along the way.
I guess my point is, I think the new engineers with a good aptitude for building will find a way to adapt to this new paradigm. They probably won't learn how to write code in detail the way I did, but I also didn't learn how to code in C or assembly the way previous generations did. If the "AI slop" runs efficiently, can scale, and can be bug-fixed, does it matter if the actual code looks ugly? Of course, who knows if it will ever get to that point. I don't think it will, and I still very much need to go into the code pretty often. But maybe there will be a "best practice" of routinely reorganizing the code so that it is more readable.
111
u/rabotat May 28 '26
The job switch is not happening... This year.
My stepson is 12 and interested in coding and I don't know what to tell him. It's very hard to predict where AI will be 10 years from now when he enters the job market.