Hi Friends,
In December 2022, I published a piece Learn to Code is the New Learn to Code. The piece focused on my experience building my first Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) app. A hideous website that prompted the user to upload a comma-separated values (CSV) file and enabled them to view and organize that information.
Fortunately for me, I grinded through building that silly toy app in the weeks preceding the release of ChatGPT on November 30th, 2022. I spent hours practicing my Google-fu, browsing StackOverflow (RIP), and being hardstuck because my Google-fu isnāt good enough (RIP). The instructions at the beginning of the post are now a relic of a prior era. No human ever needs to manually do any of the tasks that took me a stop-and-start month to complete. In the past year, I have not felt hardstuck once.
In Learn to Code is the New Learn to Code, the original ChatGPT helped me find the exact function I needed to fix an error in my app, with only a few English sentences of context. At the time, that felt like magic because I had lost hours of my life trying to write the string of < 20 characters that would fix my app and liberate me from smashing my overly-caffeinated head against the wall of a mid Austin coffee shop.
For my recent projects, I could not tell you the name of most of the functions being called to manipulate the relevant data. This is true for applications that solve real problems for me and my clients, not a toy app I was building to try to secure a web developer internship.
While the internship didnāt work out, I now spend days and nights every week building workflow automations, data pipelines and visualizations, and web applications as a consultant and researcher. While itās no longer necessary to know the name of every function youāre using, thereās no shortage of problems to solve.
The most important meta-problems: build a product that people want and build a product that will not catastrophically fail.
Solving both of those meta-problems at the same time is more difficult than most people believe. Thankfully building products no one wants, that catastrophically fail, is a good way to learn to build.
When I talk to younger people in 2026, I donāt tell them to learn to code. I tell them to learn to build. If you have problem solving skills, time and ability to focus, and the ability to communicate in any language, you can build a web application. Learn to build is the new learn to code.
Hereās how I ended the 2022 piece:
But my takeaway is the same: ālearn to promptā is not the new ālearn to codeā. Being able to utilize a tool like ChatGPT and its successors will become invaluable for developers and other creatives. The productivity of technical organizations, like all organizations, will [continue to] resemble a power law distribution. The performance disparity between the most effective and least effective developers within an organization may balloon beyond current measures. I expect that technical teams will still hire āSoftware Engineersā not āPrompt Engineersā. However, your ability to leverage AI augmented tools to complete your tasks will be a differentiating skill.
This may in fact be the best time in history to learn to code!
Many organizations still hire software engineers, not prompt engineers. Although itās in vogue to call them āMembers of the Technical Staffā. Productivity at many organizations still follows a power law distribution. There are still 10x software engineers and I donāt often hear people say 10x Member of the Technical Staff (10X MOTS). If you believe the stories about compensation for PhDs who dedicated their lives to obscure problems in machine learning and statistics, there must also be 100X MOTS.
These tools will continue to alter how people conduct knowledge work and interface with the digital world. For my work, these tools enable me to deliver higher quality products and services at competitive prices. Iām overall optimistic about all of this, despite the proliferation of slop and companies and institutionsā struggles to adapt to our weird new reality.
If you want to learn how to code in 2026, donāt ask me. Open up your terminal, paste: ācurl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bashā. After Claude Code downloads, type āclaudeā into your terminal and āaskā Claude how you should learn to build software in 2026. Start with a project! And, yes, if you want me to direct my esteemed, tastemaker subscribers towards a different agent harness Seeking Tribe is open to values-aligned sponsored content.
All joke aside, if youāre interested in learning more or building an app to help solve a problem you have, my replies and DMs are open.
Today is the best day to learn how to build software and manipulate computers big and small. If that doesnāt excite you or sound fun, donāt worry. There will be no shortage of people who want to help solve your digital problems.
How are you? Iād love to hear from everyone who reads this piece in the comments or DMs. I have a few posts queued up so youāll be hearing from me.
Your Friend,
Grant
Upvote