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You should still learn to code, says GitHub’s CEO. And you should start as soon as possible.
“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.
Dohmke isn’t the only tech leader to have identified the potential for leaner workforces — Garry Tan, CEO and president of famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, previously said he believes AI-assisted coding, or “vibe coding,” now allows 10 or so engineers to build what would’ve once required the efforts of “50 or 100.” Shrinking tech teams, however, could mean even fewer openings in software development, leading to anxiety around job replacement.
“The anxiety is understandable, but time and again, developers have discovered how to channel the new capabilities into entire domains of innovation that didn’t exist before,” Dohmke wrote in a January blog post. “They have always used automation to make their life easier.”
Though the tools are new, the mindset that GitHub’s CEO said will best allow programmers to take advantage of them is anything but. For those already in the industry, Dohmke advises retaining a sense of curiosity and using everything on hand to continually sharpen their skills.
“You got to keep rehearsing. You got to keep training. You got to keep learning. You’re never done with learning,” he said. “If I look back 30 years of what development looked like back then and what it looks like now, I would have been very behind if I hadn’t constantly read blogposts, literature, and tried out things myself.”
