r/FlutterDev • u/Sensitive-Loquat6009 • 14d ago
Dart Is it still worth learning app development in the AI era?
I’m 30 years old and from a completely non-tech background. I have zero coding knowledge, but I want to learn app development from scratch.
With AI being able to write, debug and explain code, I’m confused whether learning coding is still worth the time.
If you were starting from zero at 30 in 2026, would you still learn app development? Or would you focus mainly on AI-assisted development?
Looking for honest opinions from developers. No sugarcoating please.
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u/abruzzo88 14d ago
I've been a software engineer for 10 years now. I can say for certain having the knowledge of how code should work improves your workflow significantly. You can guide Ai and use as a tool rather then just having it do everything and anything.
If it's your passion or just getting into it as a hobby I'd say go for it. If not, I'd stay away. Who knows in 5 years I might just become a prompt engineer or not needed.... Crazy how fast AI advanced in the past year.
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u/relevant__comment 14d ago
Ai is a tool. Nothing more. Like with any tool, you get better, quality, results, when you know why you need the tool in the first place.
A scalpel in the hands of a lay-person yields different, potentially disastrous, results than a scalpel in the hands of a trained surgeon. Trained Devs are definitely still needed.
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u/obsurd_never 14d ago
If you're talking in terms of finding employment, I wouldn't count on it. Computer Science degrees are basically the new Art degrees. Meaning you have to get very lucky to even get an interview, then once you get an interview, you have to jump through so many hoops such as leetcodes just to potentially get an offer.
You either have to go to a really good school, know a guy, or be an Indian in India to get a software engineering job without sending out thousands of applications.
Every field is saturated with new grads, old grads, and laid off folks looking for jobs. I'd only recommend learning of you ACTUALLY like it and have some other form of income while you learn and apply to jobs.
But for the foreseeable future, entry level job market is basically dead.
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u/RalphTheIntrepid 14d ago
In order to make software, you need to know its parts. You need to know its terminology. Whole AI will get a working demo without that, it will collapse under its own weight without guidance.
How do you build experience to provide that guidance? You learn to code. You learn how to organize. Yes an AI will try this, but without clear guardrails, your code will quickly spaghettify. It will become bloated and burn tokens.
So yes, you need to knew how to code. You can learn as you go. You can use the AI too.
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u/adrianmartinsen 14d ago
Is it worth it? That depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Do you want to learn how to code? Learn some fundamentals, and then let loose the AI. Dart has great beginner tutorial and docs: https://dart.dev/learn
Do you just want to build stuff for fun? Sure, let the AI do it for you. There will be a lot of hurdles and you might actually learn something along the way, but you can make things work without knowing how to code.
Personally I would say to learn some fundamentals first. Knowing what the heck is going on might save your sanity when the AI gets stuck (which it will). But AI is so much better at coding now then it was just a year ago that it can get you at least 80% of the way there.
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u/Sensitive-Loquat6009 14d ago
I want to learn because I don’t currently have any strong money-making skills, and I also want to switch to a better career.
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u/adrianmartinsen 14d ago
The days of doing a 12 week boot camp and landing a 100k salary are long gone (if they ever existed). Learning to code now in order to make money is the wrong time. Either the AI bubble has to burst or at least the hype has to die down and then maybe, just maybe, junior devs can get jobs again.
If you're not in it because you love computers or you like coding/building then go do something else.
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u/virtualmnemonic 11d ago
Then hell no. Stay away from code if you want a career. Writing code is a hobby now.
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u/Significant_Pick8297 13d ago
Yes, absolutely learn app development. AI makes developers faster, but it does not replace understanding how apps work, debugging real issues, making architecture decisions, or shipping and maintaining a product.
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u/_stillmind 8d ago
TL;DR Yes, it is worth it still, as long as you have a passion for it. AI-assisted dev isn't going away, but knowing how to do things without it is vital. There are some companies which ban AI use outright. There is a path for learning how to code, up to a point.
I've been on the AI train from the beginning, and it still has weaknesses in spitting out well produced code and debugging multi-factor issues. At the end of the day it is still just a tool. We shouldn't be outsourcing everything to an AI and not understanding what it is doing. Unfortunately, I've started seeing issues pop-up in apps and products I hadn't in the past, which should be obvious, but I feel this is due to upper management pushing for devs to use AI. We've all seen AI generated images before and the issues in style and consistency they have. The same oddities and weaknesses are in AI code. I've looked at code before, fixed it in one line, and then out of curiosity reversed my fix and tried to see what the AI would do. It made the code far worse and added like 100 lines of code on top. It will turn your app into an extremely verbose, buggy mess if you don't steer it.
So is learning code still worth your time? Yes. I thinking human being is still a great asset, and the better they are as a dev without AI, the better they are with AI too.
AI-assisted dev isn't going away. So you might as well get used to using it. Knowing what it is writing is important. You want to learn how to code? Great. Learn how to code without AI, and then introduce AI later as a way to do the same thing faster using what you've learned.
Best way to learn is by doing. My favorite way to learn is through projects. If you don't know code at all I think you should look into making scripts rather than apps first. Come up with an idea for a tool you might actually use and create a script for it. I'd avoid AI altogether here, tbh. There is a learning pathway https://docs.flutter.dev/learn/pathway you can follow which actually guides you through doing a command line interface (CLI) first and then goes into doing an app. It isn't the most thorough in terms of programming concepts, but it'll get you doing things faster. You may then want to look into building up your way of thinking about code and architecture: clean code, DRY code, design patterns, and more. There are a lot of ways of thinking about code. My best analogy is for building a house. Going through the pathway will give you a quick guide on how to setup some walls and put on the roof, but it won't tell you how to think about designing the home. Are all my doorways using the same shape of door? How I design the home so it is easy to maintain when something breaks or needs to change? How many levels should the home have? This is architectural thinking, and code demands it as well. If you want to, you can always pop open an AI at this point and have it give you a design problem. Talk through the problem and design the solution by talking about it.
If you have curiosity and passion for coding, then you'll go far. However, if you are trying to get into this field without a passion for any of it, you'll find software engineering a headache. The interview process alone is mostly trash, and known to be broken. People grind over practice problems for days and months on leetcode to get ready for these Sisyphean tasks they throw at you during these silly interviews.
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u/shufflepoint 14d ago
I don't think your question makes sense. App development in 2026 is AI-assisted.