Learning coding, six years later

Six years ago today, 11 July 2020, I started learning to code for real.

I’ve tried learning before that, but I always dropped out after a few weeks, because those formal courses were so boring and useless. I went with Vue.js, and somehow the syntax clicked, and the rest is history.

It’s wild how things have shifted six years later.

Six years later, coding is the easy part now. Now with AI, learning how to code is 100x easier. The problem now is flipped. It’s so easy doing vibecoding now, people don’t bother learning, they just tab tab tab, approve and let AI run the show without trying to pick up anything. But if you take a more growth mindset, learning-oriented attitude, you can pick up coding 100x faster, because AI is exactly the inexhaustible, patient, non-judgemental, yes-man of a tutor every rookie coder didn’t know they need. I’ll gladly sound like a grumpy old man saying this - kids these days don’t know how good they got it.

Six years later, you don’t really need to learn before you can do. You can just mostly do, and learn bits along the way. Framework wars are all but gone. Nowadays people fight about which LLM is better, not which framework is better. Because with AI, the programming language is English.

Six years later, anyone can trivially code an app in one shot, while in the past I would be stuck trying to install homebrew or whatever tooling I needed before I could even write code.

Six years later, I wished I started today instead. That would have been lots of blood, sweat and tears saved. For most hard things in life, rarely do I wish I started later. But with coding, for sure I do.