YC CEO Garry Tan & Replit founder Amjad Masad on why learning to code is more important than ever

A lot of college freshman who want to be founders ask Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan about the impact of AI on coding — “The code will write itself, right? So I don’t have to study this anymore?”

But Garry tells them that’s the absolute wrong takeaway:

“It is far higher leverage to know how to code than ever before. It’s actually even more important and will make you way more powerful… You are going to be able to orchestrate this giant army of agents… [And you’ll be able] to build whatever the heck you want, whenever you want, literally from any computer.”

Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad agrees and compares it to Moore’s Law:

“The return on learning to code is doubling every six months or something like that. Learning to code a little bit in 2020 was not that useful because you’d get blocked — you wouldn’t know how to deploy or configure something. But in 2023 with ChatGPT, learning to code just a little bit will get you fairly far because ChatGPT can help you. And then in 2024, learning to code a little bit is a massive leverage because we have agents and there’s lots of really cool tools out there like Cursor that will get you super far… Just extend that forward. Six months from now, you’re going to have even more power. Programmers are just on this massive trajectory of increased power.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Now Anyone Can Code: How AI Agents Can Build Your Whole App“ (Oct 2024)