Video · Cole Medin ·

Is Learning to Build Software Still Worth It with AI? (My Honest Take)

Cole Medin argues that software-building skills remain valuable as AI agents take on complex tasks, because language models cannot read your mind and you must still communicate your intent and build a harness around the agent, including planning up front and validating the output at the end. He explains that the viral 'Reverse Engineer Anything' (REA) GitHub repo works so well specifically because the finished application already contains the intent, letting the agent validate its own output reliably, which is why it is not a fair example of agents being able to build anything. He warns against the 'meat proxy' trap of dumping a ticket into a coding agent and passing back whatever it returns without your own critical thinking, and offers a test for evaluating whether a skill is worth investing in: if the next model is twice as good, does the skill matter more or less.

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