Val Town's founder: code is worth learning even when LLMs write it for you

Steve Krouse, founder of the coding startup Val Town, concedes the point that “learn to code” has vanished as Silicon Valley’s go-to advice — knowing a bit of JavaScript no longer buys a six-figure salary now that LLMs can generate working code on demand. But he argues the vocational framing was always the wrong reason. Like math, literature, or science, coding is worth learning for what it teaches, not just for the job it lands.

His case is developmental. Drawing on Seymour Papert’s LOGO project — the idea of a “Mathland” where kids absorb math by exploration the way they absorb a native language — Krouse credits programming with teaching him meta-skills like debugging, composition, and logical decomposition, plus the deeper conviction that anything can be learned. He frames coding as a uniquely satisfying blend of writing’s creativity, math’s precision, and a video game’s instant feedback, and pushes back on the notion that code is mere inscrutable detail: like law, it’s the formal language the modern world actually runs on.

The throughline is that LLMs no more threaten code literacy than they threaten the humanities. We don’t stop valuing writing because models can produce English, so there’s no reason to stop valuing the ability to express precise intent in code. Krouse positions universal “code literacy” as a goal that survives the AI era intact — less a career hedge than a form of empowerment.