Why I am not sending my kids to coding classes

15 years ago writing code was a superpower. Today I describe a task in words and an agent writes the code cleaner and faster than I would. In 10 years, when my children enter the market, writing code by hand will be like fixing a carburettor: a nice, niche and pointless skill. So I am not sending them to coding classes. I am preparing something else.

What is losing its value, and why

What loses value is not thinking, it is one specific craft operation. People still know how to fix a carburettor, it simply is not needed at scale any more. The same thing is happening to writing code by hand, and it is happening faster than school curricula can adjust.

I am not against technology. I am against preparing a child for a world that is already gone.

Four skills instead of one

Skill	Why it matters	How it is trained
Learning and changing	A working life now runs about 60 years, from 20 to 80, and over that time you change direction three or four times	Constantly changing tasks rather than one speciality for life
Asking a precise question	An agent gives exactly what you asked for and not a gram more. Fuzzy thinking buys you a lot of rubbish very quickly	Logic, philosophy, Socratic dialogue. And, oddly enough, working with agents itself: it sharpens this better than anything
Taste and judgement	The machine produces options, a human still has to choose	Exposure, music and art education, problems with no template answer
Reaching agreement with people	The only thing the machine does not take over yet	Project work and presenting from early school years

More on the precise question

This is the most underrated item on the list. Fuzzy thinking used to stay hidden for a while: a person worked for a long time and brought back the wrong thing at the end. Now it shows in seconds, because the agent instantly returns exactly what you formulated. A vague brief produces a vague result, only very fast and in volume.

The good news is that this is a trainable skill. It improves through repetition, trial and error, and the training tool is now in everyone’s hands.

What the Spanish school does well here

I like that project work and presentations start in the second and third year. A lot of focus on working in a group and on being able to explain what you made. The fundamentals are a little thin, but fundamentals are easier to add later than the ability to reach agreement with people.

Whose job is this

Waiting for the education system to rebuild itself can take a long time. It looks as though parents have to take this on themselves: look honestly at the world we are preparing a child for, and steer them towards the one where they will do better than we did.