You No Longer Need to Code

Lazar Jovanovic is Lovable's first "professional vibe coding engineer." In a LinkedIn short¹ that got some traction, he made the case that learning to code is pointless now. AI writes the code. The problem is solved.

I pushed back as I believe programming is more than just generating code. He replied: "if programming was 'the skill', then all programmers would be millionaires."

And I've been thinking about that exchange. Not because I think he made a good argument, but because it's a good example for the argument that Erz made² about vibe coding being the final form of hyper individualism and for how the discourse is currently going.

One camp, the AI coding evangelists, says code is solved: learning to program is a waste of time, prompt and ship. There's an almost religious fervor to it, as if generating code without understanding it were liberation itself. Rushing faster and faster in the hopes of gold.

The mourners say the opposite. The end of handcrafted code, the death of the craft. Something is slipping away, and the response is a defensive crouch: nothing can replace human-written code, AI output is inherently inferior, real programmers don't use agents.

And here I am, thinking that it's not about code.

When I responded to Jovanovic, my argument was: programming was never just about syntax. It's about the cognitive tools that programming gives you — problem decomposition, precision, the vocabulary to think about systems and constraints.

Linguists ran an experiment with bilinguals where they asked participants to watch video clips of people walking toward destinations and judge which scenes were most similar. German lacks progressive aspect — there's no equivalent of the English "-ing" form — so German speakers tend to perceive motion holistically, focusing on endpoints: where is the person headed? English, by contrast, forces speakers to mark ongoingness, so they attend more to the motion itself. When the bilinguals operated in German, they focused on the destination. When they operated in English, they tracked the ongoing movement³. Same person. Same task. Different language. Different perception of reality.

I'd argue programming languages do the same. When you define a function signature or a type, or draft a system design incorporating certain patterns, you're making a commitment about the shape of a problem. Knowing what a Strategy pattern is, or what a bounded context means, lets you think with those concepts. Communicate them in one word.

And there's tons of books and material about any of these ideas and concepts. Thinking of the Gang of Four⁴ or the Wizard book⁵, I've rarely implemented any of the concepts exactly as written. But knowing the names, being able to describe a solution in one word when working with other people — that's enormously useful. Both for thinking and for communicating. And it makes it much easier to prompt the models and get exactly the results you want.

So yes, you no longer need to code. But learning the language of programming is still worth it — the same way picking up a second human language is worth it even with Google Translate sitting in your pocket. You don't do it to beat the tool. You do it because the learning rewires how you think.

In this current gold rush, it's easy to optimize away all the seemingly unproductive work around work. But a lot of that work – learning, reading, contemplating, care – is what we require to live fulfilling lives². And actually needed to make an impact. Everything else is ephemeral, unattached, and lost to the void.

Building something meaningful is a team effort. The understanding it takes — you only get it by working alongside other people, wrestling the same problems they do, and slowly learning to speak their language.

Or to put it in Boris Cherny's words who heads Claude Code at Anthropic: someone has "to talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next."⁶

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