Val Town founder Steve Krouse argues that learning to code remains worthwhile despite the rise of vibe coding and AI assistants. Responding to Sam Harris podcast #481's claim that "learn to code" no longer guarantees a six-figure salary, Krouse frames programming as a liberal art rather than a vocational shortcut — valuable for the meta-skills it teaches: debugging, composition, and logic. He traces this philosophy to Seymour Papert's LOGO language and "Mathland" concept, where children learn mathematics through exploration by directing a screen turtle. Krouse credits an after-school LOGO program with transforming his own relationship with math.

Code, he contends, is a creative medium as rich as literature or music — combining writing's expressiveness, mathematics' precision, and video games' instant feedback loops. Mastering syntax feels like learning spells; once fluent, "you are a wizard." LLMs write code competently, but that no more obsoletes human programmers than AI writing obsoletes novelists. Code, like law, is the formal language our world runs on; an elegant line can change reality.

Krouse's core argument: programming teaches that nothing cannot be learned — a mindset explaining computer scientists' confidence tackling problems outside their domain. The "real computer revolution" of universal code literacy persists, and he invites curious readers to email [email protected].