My 15-year-old loves coding—is it still worth pursuing in the age of AI?

Programming gives her the ability to create things rather than just consume technology. She can build games, tools, websites, experiments, or whatever interests her, and AI can become another tool in that process. The important thing is to help her learn the fundamentals and understand the code instead of relying on generated answers she cannot explain.

Even if coding had no professional future, would that make it a waste of time? Most people who play sports, make music, paint, or work with wood never become professionals. They do those things because they find them meaningful. If your daughter is happy, learning, and balancing it with the rest of her life, supporting her interest is valuable on its own.

Let her keep coding. AI can generate code, but people still need to understand what they’re building, choose the right approach, test the results, fix mistakes, and connect software to real-world needs. Someone with strong programming fundamentals will be much better equipped to use AI effectively than someone who only knows how to ask it for snippets. And even if it never becomes a career, enjoying a challenging hobby is already a perfectly good reason.

The job market may change, but experienced developers are not suddenly irrelevant. AI-generated code still needs review, debugging, security checks, and maintenance. Programming also teaches logic, persistence, and problem-solving—skills that transfer to almost any field. Calculators didn’t make mathematics worthless, and AI doesn’t make understanding software worthless either.

The fact that she enjoys solving difficult problems is probably the biggest signal here. That curiosity and persistence matter more than whether the exact programming jobs of today look the same in ten years. She may eventually move into engineering, science, design, data, or something completely different, but the habits she develops by coding will still help her.