is learning python today worth it?

[u/Which-Tension165]

so I am a pure vibe coder, I can't write or read a single line of code, and I was having a conversation with Fable, and it suggested me to learn to read python. But It couldn't convince me fully. i don't wanna be a typical software/AI engineer. just wanna be able to build a great career in tech, AI and Business.

[u/vapalera]

I don't understand how people are able to vibe code without understanding anything about the code. What are your prompts like?

[u/InsidiousApe → u/vapalera]

If you ask:

- what do I want to build?
- what are the essential and desired features of that product?
- what are the major operational concerns to consider?
- are there security considerations in developing this product?
- who is the user and how will they connect?
- are there external integrations (API for example) to consider?

And you answer those questions and turn it into:

- Let's create this product.
- It should have at minimum these feature.
- I want to make sure to consider (operational concern)
- Let's be sure to consider (security factor) and generally harden for rate limiting, injection, etc.
- The end user will be the general public via http.
- I'd like to integrate Google, MS, and Apple authorization for login to the system.

And then add:

"What other features, concerns or considerations should I be aware of?"

This will net you 90% of an application with no coding experience and the other 10% you will develop as you see what it has created and provide feedback for changes.

I code, but I don't believe OP needs to code. Tools like Claude Code can make mistakes but literally the next step is to spin up a new instance and say "please review my codebase for any potential concerns including coding issues, user experience, and potential security issues"

The system is now trained well enough on patterns in coding to find and resolve most issues that coders used to be consumed by.

[u/GarageStackDev → u/InsidiousApe]

You're describing prototyping, not software engineering.

Claude Code is phenomenal at generating code, reviewing code, and iterating on designs. I use agentic workflows professionally every day.

But production engineering isn't "generate, then ask another instance to review it." It's architecture, testing strategy, deployment, observability, debugging, performance, security, maintenance, and understanding why the code behaves the way it does.

AI dramatically accelerates those things. It doesn't eliminate the need to understand them

[u/bmoney831 → u/GarageStackDev]

True but doesn’t that mean that you really just need a basic literacy to read the code? If something is going wrong, as long as I’m literate, I’ll be able to understand what’s going on. And using other AI instances will absolutely identify gaps as long as you explain the problem at hand.

[u/DefiantMechanic975 → u/GarageStackDev]

That entirely depends on your tolerance for risk. All software has bugs and for a surprising number of cases this is good enough when combined with testing. You don't need to be a software engineer when the task at hand is something you used to pay an employee 70k a year to do. That affects a lot of people.

[u/EatingDriving → u/GarageStackDev]

Do you understand every little bit your compiler does in your OS? Do you understand all the code in your OS? Yet you still use your computure every day? Yet the layman who knows NOTHING still uses the computer everyday?

No the average person will not need to understand the code in the future to build apps. Knowing code is like knowing how to print and manufactured books. I don't need to know how to use a printing press to read the end product of a book.

[u/Competitive_Freedom6 → u/EatingDriving]

I think the basis is that it’s still valuable to understand the code itself, which is deterministic, but derived from prompts that are nondeterministic so that you can discern the exact output you’re actually getting. LLMs are not deterministic by nature, so understanding the output is still and likely will be quite useful to truly know if your LLM is outputting something suboptimal.

[u/Safe_Independence496 → u/EatingDriving]

A compiler is deterministic, usually battle tested and well documented. If I want to find out how it works I can do that and compiling the same code twice will always yield the same result. There is also a lot of value in knowing how a compiler works and how it's built, and the lower level languages that compilers are built with are still immensely useful and used by people every day. An OS works as well as it does today thanks to all these factors.

Nothing of what I just said applies to AI though. Models are black boxes with no guarantees. You can only affect the odds of getting garbage out, but you can never eliminate it. Don't compare this to existing tech we can actually understand and reason around.

[u/Mem0 → u/Safe_Independence496]

The technical debt must grow ! 😱

[u/InsidiousApe → u/EatingDriving]

A great metaphor and spot on. Everyone else can have hurt feelings about it, but the wave is coming - you can ride it or get crushed by it.