Why I Stopped Learning to Code (Even Though It Makes Me Money)

Artificial IntelligenceScience & Technology
Written By Harry Negron

I never studied programming in college. My background is all over the place — Microbiology, Math, and K–12 Education, plus a PhD in Biomedical Sciences. The closest I got to “software developer” was in the military, where I basically reset computers, set up routers, and tackled other small IT tasks. Real coding only entered my life during my PhD days, when I discovered R, a nifty language perfect for genetics research.

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Fast-forward a bit: after graduating, I got into Old School RuneScape botting and realized I needed specific tools that didn’t exist, so I learned C#, Java, and Python to create my own scripts. I also messed around with HTML back in the Myspace era.

Not exactly a full-blown programmer, but enough to make a few cool tools — like my Bot Manager for OSRS, an app called Instanciar (a sandboxed Chrome-based browser with proxy support), and AutoQuill for automatically typing stuff in environments that frown on copy-paste, like WFH platforms. Even a Discord bot that predicts market changes using some machine learning. These things bring in steady side income from ads and affiliate marketing.

So you might ask, “Why stop learning to code if you’re literally making money off it?” The short answer: LLMs like ChatGPT are just faster and better.

Sure, ChatGPT won’t spit out a complete thousand-line program all at once, but it’s because neither will I. It’s fantastic at generating snippets and handling the tedious parts. Once you grasp basic programming fundamentals, you can guide ChatGPT to write, fix, or enhance your code. And because these models are getting better by the day, there’s less and less reason for me to invest tons of hours in perfecting my coding skills when I can outsource that grunt work to AI.

Yes, sometimes the model lags behind on the latest API changes, and debugging can be a real headache — but you can just hand-feed it the new documentation. It’s still way quicker than me slogging through pages of references. Ultimately, I realized that my time’s better spent envisioning new app ideas, brainstorming features, and letting ChatGPT handle the bulk of the coding.

If you can automate it, why not do it?

I guess the moral of the story is this: the future might belong to people who know just enough about programming to command the bots effectively — rather than sweating every detail of syntax themselves. And for me, that’s perfectly fine. Let’s leave the heavy lifting to AI, while we focus on creating something cool — and maybe even a bit profitable — out of the tools at our disposal.

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