Coding Is Dead, Long Live Ice Skating: A Completely Sensible Collapse of Reality
Somewhere between a hoodie-wearing teenager inventing social media in a dorm room and a billionaire tweeting from orbit, a quiet revolution has taken place. According to a former Google executive who once coded at 12 and climbed to corporate Olympus, coding is no longer necessary. Not just less necessary. Not optional. Not evolving. Just… obsolete.
Gone. Like floppy disks. Like DVDs. Like your uncle’s belief that Facebook is still private.
This is tremendous news, especially for the millions of students currently buried under Learn Python in 30 Days books. Turns out, they could have been ice skating this whole time.
Coding Is Now Obsolete — Which Is Shocking News to 47 Million People Currently Googling “Why Doesn’t This Code Work”
Once upon a time, coding was the golden ticket. Learn to code, they said. It’ll change your life. And it did. It created empires for people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, all of whom started young, built things, and then spent the rest of their careers explaining why no one else needs to do that anymore.
That’s like a guy who dug for gold his whole life suddenly saying, “You know what? Gold is overrated. You should try juggling.”
Elon Musk says AI will write all code, which is comforting because his cars already drive themselves… into things. Mark Zuckerberg agrees, mainly because he’s been trying to debug human emotions since 2004 and still can’t. Bill Gates reportedly nodded, then quietly updated Windows to require 14 more restarts.
And now we’re told AI has taken over. It writes code. It builds systems. It might even fix your Wi-Fi if you ask nicely enough.
Microsoft already says AI writes about 30% of its code. Thirty percent. That’s not a takeover. That’s an intern who shows up late but still gets credit.
The Golden Age of Coding (Also Known as Last Tuesday)
AI writes 30% of code now, which means 70% is still written by exhausted humans whispering “please work” to their laptops.
Coding is obsolete, but somehow every app still needs an update every 12 minutes.
Tech leaders say creativity matters more now, which is great because nobody knows what creativity means in a quarterly earnings call.
“You don’t need to write code anymore,” says a man who got rich writing code.
Kids used to build apps. Now they build prompts like, “Please don’t ruin my career, AI.”
Meet the New Job: Professional Button Clicker (Also Known as “Vibe Engineering”)
The new tech worker doesn’t code. They “orchestrate outcomes.” Which is corporate speak for typing something into AI and hoping it doesn’t accidentally invent a banking system in Latvian.
You don’t debug anymore. You emotionally negotiate with a chatbot.
“Hey buddy, could you maybe not destroy the database?”
“Sure thing! I’ve instead destroyed the backups.”
AI tools like GitHub Copilot are making it easier for non-coders to build software. Which is wonderful, because nothing says “secure infrastructure” like someone who just learned what a variable is yesterday.
Coding bootcamps are being replaced by “vibe engineering retreats” where people stare at screens and nod thoughtfully. Parents used to say, “Learn to code.” Now they say, “Learn to ask politely.”
The Rise of Ice Skating as a Core Career Skill
The advice that Gen Z should consider ice skating instead of coding is where this story really achieves lift-off.
Ice skating.
Not finance. Not engineering. Not medicine.
Ice skating.
Which raises some practical questions:
- Are hedge funds hiring figure skaters now?
- Will job interviews include a triple axel?
- Is LinkedIn about to become a rink?
Because if creativity and balance are the future, then toddlers are already wildly overqualified. Ice skating is the new coding, which explains why Silicon Valley is installing rinks next to venture capital firms.
A former Google executive says Gen Z should “ice skate instead,” which is the first time career advice has included frostbite.
What the Funny People Are Saying About AI and the Death of Software Development
“Coding is obsolete? I just spent 6 hours fixing a missing semicolon. That semicolon is not obsolete. That semicolon owns me.” — Jerry Seinfeld
“AI writes the code now? Great. So we replaced programmers with something that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, and still makes mistakes. That’s just a programmer with better PR.” — Ron White
“I love how billionaires say you don’t need skills anymore. Yeah, because they already have the money. That’s like a guy on a yacht yelling, ‘Swimming is optional!'” — Amy Schumer
The Experts Speak — And It Gets Worse for Anyone With a CS Degree
Experts now say what matters is creativity, resourcefulness, and execution. That sounds inspiring until you realize those are the same vague traits listed on every resume since 1997.
“Resourceful” is what you write when you once fixed a printer by unplugging it.
The future programmer won’t debug code — they’ll debug AI that debugged code incorrectly. Which is just debugging with extra suffering.
Eyewitness Report from the Future: Confusion as a Service
We spoke to a Gen Z college student, Tyler, who described his daily routine:
“I wake up, ask AI to do my homework, then ask AI to explain what it just did, then panic because I still don’t understand it.”
This is the new learning model: confusion as a service.
A Poll That Feels Statistically Accurate
A recent survey found:
- 63% of young people believe AI will replace coding
- 22% believe AI already replaced them emotionally
- 15% are currently Googling “what is coding”
Margin of error: ±100%, because even the poll was generated by AI.
The Real Twist Nobody in Tech Wants to Say Out Loud
Coding isn’t dead. It just moved.
Instead of writing code, you now write instructions for something else to write code. Which is like saying cooking is obsolete because now you just tell someone else to cook.
It’s still cooking. You’re just yelling more.
So here we are. Coding is dead. Ice skating is in. AI is doing everything. Humans are pivoting to vibes.
And yet… nothing works any better. Apps crash. Passwords fail. Updates break things that weren’t broken.
Which leads to the most important realization of all:
If AI has replaced coding… who is it blaming now?
This article is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. No AI was harmed, trained, or emotionally validated in the writing of this piece. If coding is truly obsolete, please notify your nearest computer immediately and watch it ignore you.
In the real world, the debate over whether coding is still a viable career skill was ignited by Hadi Partovi, a former Google and Microsoft executive and founder of Code.org, who suggested that in the age of generative AI, children might be better served learning creativity, ice skating, or other non-technical pursuits rather than programming. His comments were widely reported in Fortune and sparked immediate backlash from developers and educators who pointed out that AI-generated code still requires human oversight, debugging, and critical thinking. Microsoft has acknowledged that AI now generates roughly 30% of its codebase — but that still leaves 70% requiring human hands, judgment, and the occasional existential crisis over a misplaced semicolon.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Originally posted 2026-04-14 20:50:17.