This question shows up constantly now that AI tools can generate working code from a plain-English description. It's a fair thing to wonder about before investing months into learning Python or JavaScript. The honest answer is more nuanced than either "yes, absolutely" or "no, it's pointless" — it depends on what you're actually trying to do with it.
An AI tool can generate a working function in seconds. What it can't do is know whether that function actually solves your specific business problem, whether it's structured in a way that won't break when you need to change it next month, or whether it's the right approach at all. That judgment still requires understanding what code does and why — which means someone still needs to know how to code, even if they're not typing every line by hand anymore.
What's changed isn't whether coding skill matters — it's what "good at coding" looks like. Being able to read code, spot when an AI-generated solution is wrong, debug it, and understand how pieces fit together is now more valuable than typing speed or memorizing syntax. If anything, this makes learning to code more approachable, because a beginner using AI as a tutor and assistant can move faster than someone learning entirely from scratch a few years ago.
Basic web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) remains directly useful for building your own portfolio site, a simple business tool, or freelance web work. Python remains one of the most requested skills across data work, automation, and general scripting. Neither of these has become less valuable because AI can help write some of the code — they've become more accessible because AI can help explain and debug it too.
The most in-demand version of "coding" right now often isn't building large applications from scratch — it's using code and scripts to automate a repetitive task for a business: pulling data from a spreadsheet automatically, generating reports, connecting one tool to another. That kind of practical automation skill pairs directly with AI tools rather than competing with them.
If your goal is to understand how things work well enough to build, fix, and automate — coding is still very much worth learning. If your goal was only to type syntax quickly, that specific skill has genuinely lost some of its value. Most people learning coding today were never after the second thing anyway.