Should founders still learn to code, or is that becoming a waste of time?
I build faster now with AI than I ever could by hand. Things that used to take me a weekend now just take a prompt, and a lot of that is stuff I genuinely couldn't have written cleanly myself.
So part of me looks at non-technical founders asking whether they should learn to code and thinks the honest answer might be no, or at least not the way I did it. Spending six months grinding through tutorials to write code an AI will write better feels like a waste of time.
But then the other part of me thinks I'm only this effective with AI because I learned to code first. I can tell when the output is wrong. I know what to ask for, I catch the subtle bugs, and I have a mental model of what's actually happening underneath.
Someone who never built that intuition is sort of flying blind. They can ship until something breaks, and then they have no idea why or how to fix it.
So I don't know if I'm giving good advice or just being sentimental about a skill I happened to invest in. Maybe the intuition matters and maybe the tools get good enough that it doesn't.
If you were starting today with zero coding background, would you bother learning, or would you just get good at directing the AI?
Replies
This is one of those questions where I think both sides are right, just about different things. You're correct that grinding through six months of tutorials to write code an AI does better is probably not worth it anymore. But you're also right that your intuition is doing the heavy lifting, and that intuition came from somewhere.
The way I'd reframe it: the goal isn't "learn to code" or "don't," it's "learn enough to know when the output is wrong." That's a much smaller investment than becoming a real engineer, and it's the part that actually protects you when something breaks. So if I were starting today, I'd learn the fundamentals deliberately but skip the parts the AI has genuinely made optional. Not flying blind, but not grinding for the sake of it either.
Curious where you'd personally draw that "enough" line.
Receiptor AI
More than ever! Would you stop learning to learn a language because AI can do it? Would you stop learning how to be synthetic?
In any case, it'll depend "founder of what", but I believe having a technical (co)founder is essential. AI is just duplicating the capability of someone who knows coding.
For non-technical founders, learning how to code or vibe code is also an opportunity we have with AI. Coding is not about fixing bugs or releasing a feature, but also about building a lead magnet, a landing page, a data architecture, or dashboards.
I actually think AI makes learning to code more valuable, not less.
When everyone can generate code, the scarce skill becomes judgment. Knowing when the AI is wrong, when the architecture won't scale, or when a "working" solution is actually fragile.
AI raises the floor. It doesn't automatically raise the ceiling.