Why Learn to Code in 2026?

You have inevitably heard about how ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) can pass code challenges in job interviews. You may even have heard about companies using AI agents (programs that take natural-language instructions from an LLM and then carry out tasks on your computer) to write computer code for various software systems. In such a world, why "learn to code", as was promoted throughout the 2010s? Why not just ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to write code for what I want, even if it's at a large scale?

Well, let's put it like this: how do you know that what an LLM gives you is a good solution? Sure, you can try running it, and you can even ask an LLM to fix any errors that show up while testing, but what if you could anticipate those errors? Moreover, why not try to understand what the LLM generates in the first place?

More importantly, a significant amount of vibe-coding and agent-driven code these days is integrated without properly checking to see if everything works right. More critically, depending too much on vibe coding can create software that is not properly understood and thus is hard to debug when it fails. While vibe coding can be treated as an accessory that allows for the basics of something to be set up, it should only be treated as a tool, not as a replacement for understanding.

Even if you won't actually be writing, say, getters and setters (special methods that let you get a value from inside an object and also modify it, respectively) on your own, you should still be able to understand not just want you will want to access and change from elsewhere, but also why some ways of doing so are safer than others. If you don't you won't be able to recognize basic security and other design problems when your favorite LLM decides to, say, do all your website login within your browser instead of sending a verification message to a server (a separate computer that sends pages, data, etc across a computer network).

The bottom line is this: TL:DR; If you can't follow the steps of every bit of code an LLM spits out, you will not actually be able to make what you want.