A while back I wrote a post titled Should We Still Teach Kids To Code?. The answer was a resounding yes.

A lot has happened since then. "Vibe coding" is now all the rage — kids and adults describing what they want in plain English, AI spitting out apps and sites and games, no syntax to memorize, no semicolons to chase, no Stack Overflow tabs piling up. The barrier to making a thing went from "learn a language for a year" to "describe it in a sentence". So, does that change my recommendation?

In a word, nope!

Teaching kids to code was never about coding per se. As I wrote in the original post (and in Captain Code before that), the goal isn't churning out a future workforce of engineers. The goal is to encourage creativity. The late Sir Ken Robinson defined creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value". That's it. That's the whole game. It's about shifting kids from being pure consumers of content to being producers of it. Getting them off the couch and building something, anything, that didn't exist until they made it. If a kid can describe an idea to an AI and spit out a working app — a game their friends play, a tool they actually use, a site they show off — that's an original idea, and it has value. By Robinson's definition, that's creativity. Full stop. That's not cheating, that's a win. That is exactly the thing we were after.

But is it coding the way we did it? <insert eyeroll here> That's the wrong question. And I'd argue it's been the wrong question for a long time now.

Calculators made math easier. Templates make design easier. Phone cameras make photography and shooting videos easier. Meal kits make cooking easier. Coding is no different. And let's not romanticize the past, either. Once upon a time, "real" coding meant punch cards. Then assembly. Then high-level languages. Then high-level languages with IDEs that highlighted your typos in color and finished your variable names for you. Then frameworks that did 90% of the work before you wrote your first line. Then drag-and-drop wizards. Then code generators. Then entire libraries that hide jaw-dropping complexity behind a single function call. At every single step along the way, someone yelled that this wasn't real coding, that the kids today have it too easy, that they don't understand what's actually happening under the hood. And at every step we kept moving anyway. AI is just the latest move. Is any of that cheating? I don't know, and I don't care. The goalpost always moves, and that's ok. That's how the field has always worked.

It's not the process I care about, it's encouraging exploration that matters. No more blank canvas? No more writer's block? No more "I want to build something but I have no idea where to start"? Good! That's the friction that's been killing kids' enthusiasm for decades. Half of them gave up not because they weren't smart enough, or creative enough, or curious enough, but because the on-ramp was brutal. Now the on-ramp is short.

Yes, but is it coding? Ok, if we really have to answer that, I'd say it depends. They're creating apps and sites and games, real things that run, real things people use. So judging by the outcome, sure, that's coding. But are kids actually writing lots of code, line by line, thinking through loops and conditionals and edge cases? No. not really. So I guess it's not coding. It is. It isn't. And I'll say it again, that's irrelevant. We're arguing over a word while the thing the word was supposed to point at is right there happening in front of us. If we need a new word for "encouraging young people to not only use their devices to watch TikToks but also to create", sure, let's create that word. For now, it's "coding", and let's not let nomenclature get in the way of encouraging a generation to create.

Back to the original post:

We believe everyone should learn to code, even if they have no intentions of pursuing careers in coding.

Still true. If anything, vibe coding makes it even more true. The barrier to entry just dropped through the floor. More kids creating, more kids having original ideas, more kids making things that have value, more kids tasting that "I made this" feeling, more kids developing the planning, problem solving, persistence, and creativity muscles that come with building something from nothing. The skills the original post called out, the ones employers actually want, the ones that hold up regardless of what tools come next — those haven't changed. The tooling did.

That's the win. Always was.