Why Bother Learning to Code When AI Exists?

“Why do you still need to study that? We have AI now.”

So this happened recently and I can’t stop thinking about it. My coworker saw me watching YouTube videos about SwiftUI and he’s like… why? Just why would you bother learning SwiftUI with AI around?

I mean, fair question I guess. I’m doing ReactJS on web and React Native for mobile development. In this 2025 tech market, I should probably be learning system design or whatever - you need to know everything instead of being a generalist to stay marketable. When I told him I already know that stuff, he’s like yeah okay but still. The look on his face though. Like I was doing something completely pointless.

And honestly? Maybe I am.

But then I got home and I kept thinking about it and I don’t know… something about that whole conversation just rubbed me the wrong way.

Like, when did we stop learning things just because they’re interesting? When did everything have to be so damn practical all the time?

When Coding Stopped Being Fun

I remember when I was in high school, my tatay got me this ancient Intel Pentium III PC. I wrote my first “Kamusta Mundo?” in QBasic and I was so excited I showed everyone. My mom didn’t get it. My classmates didn’t care. But whatever, it was euphoric.

When’s the last time I felt that way about coding? Seriously, when?

These days it’s all just… work. Get the feature done. Ship it. Move on to the next thing. AI can help you debug faster, AI can write boilerplate, AI can do this, AI can do that. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. I use LLMs all the time. Way better than Stack Overflow where everyone just tells you you’re an idiot for asking, or in my Pinoy terms “GMG (Google mo gago).”

God I hated Stack Overflow. Still do actually.

But like… is that it? Is that all we’re doing now? Just trying to be more efficient code monkeys?

Maybe this is stupid but I’ve always thought of programming as art. It’s how I express ideas. At least it used to be.

Learning SwiftUI or native development isn’t going to make me more money. It’s not going to help my career. My coworker is probably right that it’s a waste of time. But I don’t care? I want to learn it because I want to learn it.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m having some kind of mid-career crisis or something. But AI being good at writing code doesn’t make me want to stop writing code. It makes me want to remember why I started in the first place.

AI vs Human Developers: What Really Matters

AI can optimize my functions and generate unit tests and whatever else. But can it get genuinely excited about figuring out how animations work? Can it stay up until 2am because it’s curious about some random code that got stuck in your head, even if it doesn’t matter?

I mean… probably actually, knowing how these things are going. But you know what I mean.

I just think there’s still something to be said for learning stuff because you want to. For being curious about things. For remembering that this job used to be fun before it became all about productivity and efficiency and getting things done as fast as possible.

Whatever. Maybe my coworker is right. Maybe I should just focus on the practical stuff and let AI handle the rest. But right now I’m going to keep learning SwiftUI and exploring new programming languages because I feel like it.

And honestly? That feels pretty good.