Marc Andreessen: recommendation

Transcript context

…So you're in the camp of still learning to code is still a valuable skill? Oh yeah, totally. Again, if you want to be one of these super... Look, if you just want to put yourself on autopilot, and like, "I can't be bothered. I'm just going to have AI write the code, and it's going to generate whatever it does and that's fine. And I'm going to be..." If the goal is to be a mediocre coder, then just let the AI do it. It's fine. The AI is going to be perfectly good in generating infinite amounts of mediocre code. No problem. It's all good. If the goal is, "I want to be one of the best software people in the world, and I want to build new software products and technologies that really matter," then yeah, you, 100%, want to still... You want to go all the way down. You want your skillset to go all the way down to the assembly, to assembly and machine code. You want to understand every layer of the stack. You want to deeply understand what's happening at the level of the chip, and the network, and so forth. By the way, you also really deeply want to understand how the AI itself works, because you want to... If people understand how the AI works, they're clearly able to get more value out of it than somebody who doesn't understand how it works. You're always more productive if you know how the machine works when you use the machine. And so the super-empowered individual on the other end of this that wants to do great things with the new technology, yes, you 100% want to understand this thing all the way down the stack because you want to be able to understand what it's giving you. And when something doesn't work or when something isn't right, you want to be able to really quickly understand why that is. By the way, again, this goes back to education. AI is your best friend at helping you learn all of that because it's like, "Oh, I need to understand. I don't know, this isn't fast enough." I need to figure out... As a coder, I need to figure out how to do a different approach to memory management or something. And you can be like, "Well, shit. I don't quite know how to do that. Okay, AI, let's spend 10 minutes. Teach me how to do this. Teach me what this all means." So all of a sudden, you have this incredibly synergistic relationship with the AI, where it's also helping you get better at the same time that's doing a lot of work for you. By the way, I was going to say, I was a big Pearl programmer. I was an engineer for 10 years, and that was my language of choice.…

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