I don't think I should teach my son to program anymore

A few years ago, I volunteered with the TEALS program to teach programming to high school students in inner-city Birmingham, AL. This was a rewarding activity because, even though I knew not every child in that class cared about what I was talking about, if I could point a few students in the right direction to learn how to program, they would be set for life. Here we are, less than half a decade later, and my puristic belief in programming as a ticket to the upper-middle class is being threatened.

The evolution started with no-code platforms like IFTTT and Zapier. These are tools that anybody can use to automate things like their home automation or corporate workflows. They require an understanding of data flows but they don't require much, if any, programming.

In the last year, we've seen a series of copilot-style coding tools released. This includes the most popular, GitHub's Copilot. These tools use AI to help programmers supplement their code, write functions, fix bugs, identify potential security issues, and overall increase their efficiency by around 30% or so. This is an incredibly useful tool for modern programmers, but it's a tool for programmers.

These two tools were useful, but I've read two things this week that have made me question whether I should continue teaching my 4-year-old how to program. First, was the announcement that a new game-changing tool called Magic is being developed that promises frontier-scale tooling. It promises to build an AI that can totally replace programmers, and it's backed by a war chest of $150M to figure out the problem. If they are able to accomplish anywhere near their promises, this tool will be able to take input directly from product managers and architect, build, test, and deploy nearly any application or feature within an application.

While we should all be expected to temper our expectations with what reality will be, if they come anywhere near this goal, they will replace huge swaths of programmers. It will also push programming into being more of a commodity.

The second event was an interview with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang where he pointed out that tools like ChatGPT caught us by surprise. For example, it was able to accomplish tasks that nobody trained it to do. It could output Cobol, a language barely anyone remembers. It was a program writing programs. "We now realize -- the world now realizes that maybe human language is a perfectly good computer programming language...We've democratized computer programming for everyone, almost anyone who can explain in human language a particular task to be performed."

If Mr. Huang and Magic are right, what does this mean for my son, who is about 2 decades away from entering the workforce? For me, it means that I should be spending more time with my son encouraging his strengths in recognizing problems, building his emotional intelligence, and fostering creativity, rather than how to write the perfect C# or Python scripts. He should understand how computers work and how AI models work, but the way he will interact with them will be nothing like the type of work I have done in my career.