Learn to code, we said.

An apology to my oldest son.

As a mom raising two sons in Silicon Valley, whose parents both work in tech, I am guilty of hammering 3 words into their brains from their mid-2010s births:

Learn to code.

I wasn’t alone. We ALL told them that. Learn to code! Go to code camp! Here’s a STEM toy to learn circuits!

As a poetry-writing literature major, I always felt like I had slipped into this tech world through a crack. With amazing mentors, I slid from project management to mobile PM to director of social. I learned APIs on the fly, wrote documentation by copying what I saw, and taught myself Python, hitting a wall when I got to JavaScript.

From my vantage point inside Meta, I saw software engineers celebrated and fast-tracked all around me. Tech was the future. Coding was the golden ticket.

I didn’t want them to ONLY code. I wanted them to pursue what they each loved…AND learn to code.

My firstborn is now a college sophomore pursuing musical theater. I stopped pushing STEM as I watched him fall in love with performing in children’s theater, watched him light up, making art with a cast that is in-person, not digitized, and ephemeral.

This summer he made me understand his joy in connecting with people…in person…in a singular moment in time. After the years during Covid spent in their bedrooms on zoom, his generation prizes shared, in-person, human group experiences in a way that I’m not sure we’ll ever understand.

Meanwhile, this AI thing has really crept up on us here in Silicon Valley.

This week, three researchers from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab published a paper that tapped into anonymized payroll data by age, sector, job category. Was AI really coming for jobs? For Gen X and Millennials, the answer is…eventually.

But the first AI casualties have already been hit…and it’s our kids. Employer AI adoption has already driven a 13% drop in employment for 21-25 year olds with brand-new computer science degrees and no experience yet.

Yup. The ones who listened to our advice, dropped their interests and arts and hobbies. And learned to code.

The past couple weeks I’ve cooled it on the AI posting, to focus on the reading, learning, and truly trying to listen to what everyone else has to say about ethics and art, about careers and consciousness. I took a step back for a moment to get a longer view on the shocking amount of change AI is driving…and how we never saw it coming this way.

I’m thinking about my son and his classmates, who is largely offline by choice, who prioritize making analog art collectively with each other, in the moment, in person. It’s messy and imperfect and utterly human. It’s a way of life I think we all took for granted while learning to code, these fragile human-on-human moments, no screens, no AI.

I see it now, kid. I’m sorry it’s so late. You guys have the idea—thanks for not listening.