Being able to create is one of life's big joys. I've never been good at drawing or painting, but for 30 years, code has been my tool of choice to create. It's allowed me to build products that help millions of people, it's been an outlet for my creativity and a place to challenge me intellectually.
And for that 30-year period, the route into tech has been stable:
- Learn coding basics.
- Start making basic things.
- Improve your coding skills.
- Make more complex things.
- Go to 3 (repeat forever!)
At some point, you'd be ready to apply for a job. And you'd be tested on how well you knew a language or an algorithm or could manipulate data structures.
Code was always the gatekeeper. The thing you had to master to be able to do anything. You literally couldn't use a technology unless you knew how to write code to power it. You couldn't get a job if you didn't have solid coding skills.
But now, thanks to LLMs, all that is changing.
In 5 years, no-one will be hiring you for your coding skills. They're irrelevant. I have barely written a line of code in the last year, but through Claude, I've output hundreds of thousands of lines of code. And they work. They sit together in a coherent manner and power platforms like Jiki and have solved countless bugs in Exercism, Kaido and Giki. But they only do that because I know what I'm doing. Without the guidance of a human, they would not have got here.
A developer's value is not in their ability to write code (although you still need to know how!). It's in their ability to make things properly.
And this has always been true. Software developers have always been hired for their ability to craft software, to develop systems, to solve bugs. They've not been hired because they can type code well. There is skill in writing code, but only as a mechanism for expressing deeper conceptual design.
You don't have to weave manually anymore. You have a super-intelligent loom that does that work for you. Your job is to know how to guide and control and maintain that wisely.
So what do I need to do?
Your new loop is:
- Make something.
- Understand how it works (both the code and the ideas).
- Repeat 1.
To do this you need two things:
- A guide (👋)
- A willingness to experiment and play and learn!
And you need to be doing that playing and learning at the edges of your knowledge. You need to keep trying new things and invest in understanding what's going on.
The pitfall
It's trivial with Claude to say "Make me a homepage" and then iteratively say "Make that green box blue instead" or "Make the font size a bit bigger". This involves basically no skill.
You have to resist the urge to ask Claude to make something and then feel good from the little dopamine hit you get. You have to realise that just because Claude has made something, you have not necessarily added any value. In fact, at the beginning, you're literally just doing the same as what anyone else could do.
But coming up with a real vision, understanding and planning how all the bits will fit together, and then being able to successfully guide an LLM to make it, keeping it on track, knowing where it's going wrong, or going to cause you pain later... That's a real skill.
Every day I use Claude Code, it does stuff that is very obviously wrong to me. It tries to take me down paths that range from suboptimal to outright bad. But it makes it so easy, and it does so much right, that it's hard to know that at first. And as these models are increasingly designed to be run autonomously, the skill of the developer is increasingly in that overseeing, guiding place.
Levelling yourself up
You need someone to teach you how everything works and the right mental pathways to follow. Then you need to build things, make mistakes, see what happens when Claude screws you over, and learn from those things. So that you can add value to a company that's building things. You need to understand technology, understand how software is built, learn to read code so you can understand what's going on, and feel confident with the whole flow and process of making things.
And Jiki will teach you all that. Follow our Coding Fundamentals pathway to get the coding basics down, then come and learn to build things with me. Understand why you need GitHub and how it works, how Cloudflare will protect you, how to design secure auth, how to make efficient databases, how to build lightning-fast front-ends and rock-solid back-ends. Learn how to deploy things so that they heal if they crash. Learn all these with me. And have a ton of fun on the way.
See you inside!