Chennapragada: 'Coding is dead' is fundamentally wrong; abstraction is just shifting
Aparna Chennapragada · Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · May 18, 2025 · at 25:59
Microsoft CPO Aparna Chennapragada pushes back against claims that learning computer science and coding is obsolete due to generative AI.
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“A lot of folks think about, oh, you know, don't bother studying computer science, or, you know, the coding is dead, and I just fundamentally disagree. If anything, I think You know, we've always had higher and higher layers of abstraction in programming. You know, like, we don't program in assembly anymore. Like, most of us don't even program in C, and like, and then you're kind of, you know, higher and higher layers of abstraction. So to me, there will be ways that you will tell the computer what to do, right? It'll just be at a much higher level of abstraction, which is great. It democratizes. There'll be an order of magnitude more Software operators. Like, instead of Swiss, maybe we'll have source, right? But that doesn't mean you don't understand computer science, and it's a way of thinking, and it's a mental model, so I strongly disagree with the whole, like, coding is dead.”
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