Is Learning to Code Still Worth It in 2026?

[nelsonic]

If you are already a software engineer or aspiring to be one,
watch this video by Alberta Tech: https://youtu.be/42V0xazKHZA
It should reassure you - even just temporarily - that there is still a "future" for coding
and it's a worthwhile investment of your time.

She makes several valid points.

1. Ai Model CEOs (with a vested interest in hyping) have be predicting the end of software engineering for a long time.

https://x.com/fchollet/status/1993341471039406405

In case you don't know, @fchollet creator of Keras and ARC-AGI is not a pundit; he's the real deal. 🧠

The Ai Company CEO's/Investors have a vested interest in making highly optimistic predictions to drive their valuations.

2. LLM Creators are running out of primary data (code) to train on.

Yes, the Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to improve through refinement and feedback (RLHF)
but there are major diminishing returns which mean the rate of improvement is slowing. 📉
At this point, all the coding LLMs have already scraped (stolen? 🤔) and assimilated all of GitHub, GitLab, StackOverflow and the blogs/tutorials/videos on the internet. What else is left for them to be trained on? 🤷‍♂️

Many of the smartest people in the world and Trillions of Dollars have been poured into replacing software engineers.

For good insight into the AI Capex Boom, read:
https://www.bridgewater.com/research-and-insights/the-macro-implications-of-the-ai-capex-boom

Salesforce fired 4000 senior engineers last year claiming their "Agentforce" was already good enough to do much of the work.
Salesforce recently admit they were wrong: https://youtu.be/TbIPUVkImGE the "Agentforce" replacing engineers isn't going very well.

Many in the investor/tech community are saying that the firing of employees in favor of Ai is/was a stock-pump, it clearly backfired.

Note: I'm not saying that Ai won't replace many routine software engineer roles, it definitely will, eventually.
I'm just no longer convinced that it will replace all engineers in the long run; especially with all the slop that will need to be fixed.

3. Experienced / Senior Engineers with deep knowledge/understanding of systems/deployment will be needed for the foreseeable future.

In the video Alberta states the following:
"To debug, is to learn what is wrong with the code. To know what is wrong with the code,
you have to understand what the code is doing in the first place."

So if you want [continue] to be employed as an engineer, just focus on being the best at your chosen systems / tech stack.
i.e. not much has changed ...
And you will be expected to baby-sit Ai/Agents that "know" less than you ... 💭