Every time someone posts one of these “coding is over” essays on Medium, they undo a good chunk of effort on the part of programming advocacy organizations like Women Who Code, Girl Develop It, CoderDojo and Code.org.

People read the essay and think, “Gee, why should I bother learning to code when this professional developer is telling me it’s not a valuable skill?”

Your main argument seems to be that website builders like Wix and Squarespace will replace developers. Nontechnical product managers will be able to feed a list of requirements into a computer and a fully-formed software solution will emerge moments later.

Misinformed futurists have been heralding the end of programming at the hands of such tools since the 1990s. But the deeper you get into coding, the more you understand how far we have to go before that’s going to happen.

Sure, you can highlight things that can be built without writing any code. For example, here’s a video I made of how you can deploy a dynamic website for free, without writing any code:

But this is, of course, merely scratching the surface of what’s possible if you actually put in the time to properly learn coding.

Though I disagree with your essay, I do hope you’ll stick with coding. Because the world needs coders.