Blancmange or Soufflé?

AI has broken the dam holding back a reservoir of coding talent.

There is a certain set of people who, were it not for AI, would never have learned to code in the traditional way (defined here by the reading of coding magazines and thick books on C++ and Python) who now have the ability to create via natural language, which is less of the great equaliser but rather the great enabler. The learning curve of traditional coding is incredibly steep, and this is a shot in the dark because I am not a neuroscientist, but I would hazard a guess that the traditional way lends itself much more to a certain type of logical thinker.

I believe it can be a good thing that the ability to code with AI becomes more ubiquitous. Yes, there will be more terrible programs out there, but by sheer volume, and gaining access to the untapped potential of those amongst us who are not entirely analytical or methodological in our thinking and perhaps more creative, we will arrive at some extremely interesting ideas and solutions.

But I have been wrestling with the thought: which way around do you eat your dessert? A terrible analogy, but bear with me.

Those of us who are learning to code in the agentic era are eating our dessert first. Traditional developers had their dinner first: the fundamentals needed for good code (whatever those are, I am a vibe coder, but I'd say error-free syntax, sound and secure). Now, with agents, they get to eat dessert too, and perhaps tap into the more creative skillsets as they build amazing things.

If we care enough about what we are doing, we should think about going back and eating our dinner. Vibe coders might benefit from putting the sugary treat of their agentic workflows to one side or, at least in parallel, start to learn about systems thinking, getting into the actual lines of code to understand at least the inner workings, even if it's unlikely you will be editing semicolons, etc.

You are enjoying eating blancmange, when with a little mathematics, traditional coding understanding and foundational learning you might be eating soufflé.

Which leads me to what I am experimenting with at the moment, and all experiments lead to Rome. Off the back of building games with my daughter last week that help her to find mathematics fun, I thought long and hard (not that hard, more like a quick Gemini search) about how I might also find mathematics fun myself at the tender age of 37, landing on the brilliant tool of brilliant.org.

It's strange because, as an adult and with an outside perspective, I knew exactly what to do to help my daughter, but I was much slower to help myself and figure it out. Maybe I, too, didn't find maths all that fun at school, but there is no reason why I can't change that now.

And because I've read many books on statistics, game theory, and probability, I have an ok grasp of what they are talking about in high-level terms, but I'm quite disconnected at the granular, equation-level engineering. Meaning, I know what is meant by, say, standard deviations, normal distributions, averages, etc., but I struggle to do long division and algebra. Something that I would quite like to get better at by finding the fun in it.

No B2B lessons to be derived here (thank goodness). I know it's LinkedIn, but we can still have fun, can't we?

The brilliant 1998 action film Ronin.

Revisiting one of the films that I know I watched in my early adolescence but hadn't revisited, despite it being on my to-watch list for a long time.

Yes, I am a film nerd, but I was a car nerd first. And to see these 90s European cars driving around picturesque parts of France, being driven around by Robert De Niro and Jean Reno, well, I believe that to be the epitome of cool.

I tried to pick up a novel this week, I really did, but Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist has been sitting on my shelf for an age, and on my to-read list for even longer.

I've read The Economist on and off for years. I will concede economics is still mostly a dark art to me. My hope is that this book might be revelatory for a lay person like myself, to finally get to grips with basic economics (I might be doing myself a disservice here; yes, I am lay, but I AM NOT THAT lay).

That's everything for this week.

Matt

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Closing bigger deals. Founders who need to sell. The mental game of revenue generation, or even getting into the industry in the first place.

Hit reply if any of that relates to you. Always happy to talk.

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