Why Learn Coding? Why Learn Anything?!

On Saturday, I proudly watched my daughter present three beautiful piano compositions, including Beethoven’s Für Elise. It is such a wonderful feeling to see a human being become better at playing the piano, especially when that human being is your own daughter.

While listening to her play, one thought wouldn’t stop bothering me: what motivates her to learn the piano? Over the past months, I’ve seen her struggle as the pieces she learned became increasingly complex. Sometimes, she came home sad from piano class because the teacher was not happy with her progress, or because she made a tiny mistake.

Plus, she knows full well that there are plenty of music AI apps that can play any piano composition with zero mistakes. So how does she stay motivated and keep rehearsing? The answer struck me almost instantly, and it’s pretty obvious. But bear with me before I reveal it.

Coding is “solved”?

We keep hearing that “coding is solved.” Claude Code writes code for us, generates user interface elements, and even writes commit messages. We are told that learning to code is outdated, boomer stuff, that English is the new programming language.

Dare to disagree publicly, and you’re labeled a relic of the past, a fossil who doesn’t get what vibe coding and prompt engineering actually are. We are told that a $200-a-month Claude subscription can replace the pathetic human developer who used to earn well over six figures and got perks like a company car, free dinner, a gym membership, massages, and whatnot.

Are plumber jobs more secure? Really?

We are also told to forget “white-collar” jobs and become a plumber instead. I don’t quite get why some people think blue-collar jobs are more secure if we follow this logic. AI now has a physical body too, and we’ve already seen what robots are capable of.

So why would a plumber’s job be more secure than a software engineer’s or a lawyer’s? Unless you can rotate your neck 360 degrees while running backward and performing perfect backflips, you’re not better than today’s robots.

What if nobody learns the syntax of any programming language anymore? What if, say, twenty years from now, the last person who understands what a doubly linked list is dies? What if, by then, we create software simply by saying, “Make me a game where I can shoot hybrid monster flying carrots,” or, “I need an HR agent to recruit the cheapest robots for my robot plant”?

Are we going to be happier?

What will people do? Collect their weekly UBI and let their driverless cars take them somewhere nice? Play video games all day long? Get drunk, or worse, to forget the dull, aimless lives they’re living?

Really, is that the future we, or rather some people, are building for ourselves?

Okay, so what motivates my daughter to rehearse the piano? Why do our kids still learn how to write essays when ChatGPT is better and faster at anything text-related? Why do they still have gym classes at all? Why do kids have to run for a good grade when no human being will ever outrun a car?

Why? Because it’s fun.

We enjoy doing these things. And even if our self-proclaimed tech overlords tell us that we need to optimize the hell out of everything and outsource our thinking, creativity, and ultimately our purpose to intelligent, power-hungry black boxes, this simply won’t work.

Because what remains is NOT fun. It’s a dead world filled with data centers and self-feeding algorithms that would slowly erode the very purpose of us humans: to learn, evolve, love, create, and leave this world in better shape than we found it.