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With AI, you no longer need to learn to code — admitting this was painful because it made my entire 15-year mission to teach coding obsolete, but as an entrepreneur you have to be honest with yourself.

Masad recounts the painful moment he realized his life's work — making coding easier to learn — was no longer necessary, because AI has advanced to the point where anyone can build software without writing code. ✦ AI generated

Amjad Masad · Platformer · 2026-08-07 · original ↗

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You've said publicly that it no longer makes sense for most people to learn how to code — which is interesting, because you were a founding engineer at Codecademy, a company that taught people exactly that. What was the moment you decided the old way was over?

Now, in 2025, when we started getting Opus and the new Claude models, I was like, okay, I need to be honest with myself. My entire life mission around teaching people coding is changing. You don't need to code anymore. And I started building things without looking at the code — this was before Karpathy even coined 'vibe coding.' So I was on TBPN, and I said it. It was actually kind of a painful moment, because here you are, you dedicated your life — I've been working on making coding easier for literally 15 years, most of my adult life — and I'm saying everything that I worked toward is kind of moot, and the way forward is that we make programming so easy that anyone could do it. That was hugely controversial. A lot of engineers on Twitter and Hacker News attacked me: why do you say this? It's not true. You're going to get people in trouble because they're going to build apps that are insecure. And I was like, well, any problem AI could create, AI could solve. We could create a security agent. None of their concerns were actually unsolvable. And lo and behold, here we are, mid-2026, and most engineers — not just vibe coders like you and I — most engineers don't look at the code. I talk to engineers at our company, and they only look at the code when it's about to get deployed. They do a code review, and increasingly we're automating the code review process as well. But as an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself. Otherwise the company would die, and you would not be aligned with the future.

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