Opinion certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Hiremath: Learning Programming Is Still Essential, Shifting to Natural Language Abstraction

Adarsh Hiremath · Adarsh Hiremath @ Mercor: The Fastest Growing Startup in Silicon Valley | E1261 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Feb 20, 2025 · at 28:45

Adarsh Hiremath is the co-founder and CTO of Mercor, an AI hiring platform. He addresses public advice telling students to avoid studying computer science due to AI code generation.

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“My take is that programming is actually more important today And it's just going to happen at a different level of abstraction. One could argue that the leap from assembly to Python was actually maybe even a bigger leap than the leap from Python to natural language. So my answer there is that the way we define programming will look very, very different. It may be a person who, you know, has like average skills by today's standards and in computer science, Who's orchestrating thousands of superhuman coding agents to achieve more than we thought was even possible. But that skill set, which, you know, we can define as programming at a different level of abstraction, programming in English, is gonna be super important.”

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