Don’t Learn Programming? The Call Actually Started from Inside the AI Circle, Not from Media Influencers
In February 2024, Jensen Huang said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai: In the past, everyone advised kids to learn computer science. Now it’s almost the complete opposite. What NVIDIA wants to do is turn human language into the programming language, so that everyone becomes a programmer.
A year later, former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy coined a new term: “vibe coding”—programming by feel. Just let the AI write the code, don’t even look at it, and when it errors out, simply paste the error back and let it fix itself.
The weight of these two people’s words outweighs a hundred media articles claiming “programmers are about to be unemployed.” Honestly, the first time I came across these comments, my heart skipped a beat too.
But as these remarks spread, two key details got lost in transmission.
When Jensen Huang said that, NVIDIA’s careers page was still full of software engineer openings. In Karpathy’s original post, he also noted that this approach is suitable for “weekend projects you throw away when you’re done.” Later, when talking about his open-source project nanochat (training a chat model from scratch), he put it even more bluntly. In his view, AI Agents (autonomous agents that can modify code and run commands) are good at boilerplate. For something like nanochat, where every part needs precise arrangement, most of the code still has to be written by hand.
One person shouts “don’t learn programming” while still hiring engineers. Another teaches people to hand all the code over to AI, yet still has to type line by line on his own projects. I don’t think they’re being hypocritical. More likely, the “programming” they’re talking about is fundamentally different from what we usually understand by the word.
