Thinking in code

For the last few months, I’ve been having fun solving small coding puzzles around loops, conditions, pseudocode, debugging—the things that probably became invisible years ago to anyone who learned to code properly. What I didn’t expect was how much this would change the way I use coding agents now. There is a popular idea right now that LLMs make learning to code less important. I think that is true if by “coding” we mean remembering syntax. I increasingly don’t need to know exactly how to write something in Python. The model is already better at producing code than the average person will ever need to be. But programming was never really about syntax. It is about taking something vague and making it precise enough that a computer can execute it. And we are all going to be doing much more of that. One of the first things you learn in programming is pseudocode: before writing the actual code, describe what should happen in simple instructions. read email classify urgency And there are…