You Should Still Learn To Code, Says GitHub CEO

You should still learn to code, says GitHub's CEO. And you should start as soon as possible. From a report: 'I strongly believe that every kid, every child, should learn coding,' Thomas Dohmke said in a recent podcast interview with EO. 'We should actually teach them coding in school, in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and what-not.' Coding, he added, is one such fundamental skill -- and the only reason it's not part of the curriculum is because it took 'us too long to actually realize that.'

Dohmke, who's been a programmer since the 90s, said he's never seen 'anything more exciting' than the current moment in engineering -- the advent of AI, he believes, has made the field that much easier to break into, and is poised to make software more ubiquitous than ever. 'It's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into Copilot or ChatGPT or similar tools, and it will likely write you a basic webpage, or a small application, a game in Python,' Dohmke said. 'And so, AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding.'

AI, Dohmke said, helps to 'realize the dream' of bringing an idea to life, meaning that fewer projects will end up dead in the water, and smaller teams of developers will be enabled to tackle larger-scale projects. Dohmke said he believes it makes the overall process of creation more efficient. 'You see some of the early signs of that, where very small startups -- sometimes five developers and some of them actually only one developer -- believe they can become million, if not billion dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them,' he added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.