I learned to program by shitting out God awful shell scripts that got gently thrashed by senior devs. The only way I've ever learned anything is by having a real-world problem that I can solve. You absolutely do NOT need a CS degree to learn software dev or even some of compsci itself, and I agree that tools like Bolt are going to make shit harder. It's one thing to copy stack overflow code because you have people arguing about it in the comments. You get to hear the pros and cons and it can eventually make sense. It's something entirely different when an LLM shits out code that it can't even accurately describe later.

Indeed. A huge proportion of Gen X professionals were self taught children who learnt on home computers and then grew up.

CS degrees don't teach you how to code. They teach you computer science.

just python and looking up every single thing i want the code to do "python print text"
"python get input"
"python loops"
"python iterate through list"

and this is why i'm such a diehard python shill, it doesn't require you to write 5 billion lines of boilerplate code to print some fucking text, it's very approachable.

To be fair, in the quoted passage the author is explicitly not referring to Bolt, but asking for explanations of specific, probably small scope issues from non-agentic AI tools.

Personally even while in school for CS I spent a large number of hours staring at a screen being totally unsure how to proceed to figure out what I didn't understand, most of it trivial details, or making random edits and hoping it would fix something. I'm sure there are advantages to learning by stumbling around, but I really don't think it's the ideal way unless you're already a very methodically curious person.

The temptation to jump directly to asking the AI to just do everything for you without yourself understanding it is definitely going to be a stumbling block for people learning, and I'm not sure if there's a good way around that one, but otoh something available 24/7 that can mostly accurately answer beginner questions in context and as you have worded them seems like it would be crazy helpful, so many times I just wasn't able to progress until I could get some attention from someone.

No, nothing would change: those who can't code will continue to not coding or write some useless gibberish.

The ai didn't do it for her 🫠