Does anyone still need to learn to code in 2026? The latest models — like Opus and Codex — are so fast and so good that reviewing the code is now a bigger burden than writing it.
But here's the trap for beginners: they're generating massive amounts of code without any real experience in a codebase, so they have no idea what they're actually doing. Get into a real job and you can have the model build something, but you can't explain why it works or back up your decisions.
That deep, critical thinking is still the core skill of being a software engineer, even when AI writes most of the code.
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