Comment by coldtea
1 day ago
>the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.
Considering opportunity cost, a young person paying $20 or $100 per month to Claude API access is way cheaper than a young person spending a couple of years to learn to code, and some months coding something the AI can spit in 10 minutes.
AI coding will still create generations that even programming graduates know fuck all about how to code, and are also bad at reasoning about the AI produced code they depend on or thinking systematically (and that wont be getting any singularity to bail them out), but that's beside the point.
Applying opportunity cost to students is a bit strange...
People need to take time to get good at /something/. It's probably best to work with the systems we have and find the edge where things get hard, and then explore from there. It's partly about building knowledge, but also about gumption and getting some familiarity with how things work.
But all the other students are doing the same, so the expectation will quickly become use of tools for potentially years.
My introduction to programming was through my dad's outdated PC and an Arduino, and that put me on par with the best funded.