In programming, why is almost the fundamental of learning: knowing the reason or purpose of a code or set of codes and not just making it work. Most beginners in programming tend to be more fixated on programming languages or technologies rather than understanding programming (its principles and concepts) deeply.
Some may wonder: how does one have access to working codes without an understanding? In today’s world of GenAI that has been made possible; it is “vibe coding”. The term was introduced by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, in February of this year, 2025.
Vibe coding (or vibecoding) is programming technique dependent on artificial intelligence (AI), where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding
With this you can skip the why but here is my two cents in this article “why not to skip why”. Oh! two reasons.
Some concerns have been raised by some practitioners in the field. For example, William Falcon, creator of PyTorch Lightening, in conversation with Stack Overflow says:
“I'm very bullish on very good developers augmenting with AI. I'm not super bullish on newish developers augmenting with AI because they tend to just get lied to by the model.”
Here we go
Trading creative and problem-solving skills for mere mechanical efficiency:
Creativity and problem-solving skills are born from a deep understanding of programming.
I could remember while I was in secondary school, I had this penchant for solving all the questions in my mathematics textbook. There are two ways I could achieve this: first, start from the problem and work out the answer, and another mischievous way for those ‘hard to crack ‘mathematical questions is to spy on their answers at the back of my textbook and work my way back to the problem (funny!). Soon, I realized that the latter method does not help me improve on my critical thinking and problem-solving skills as the former does! As a fact they atrophy!
Bring this forward to vibe coding: the working codes are first provided and then followed up with an explanation. From our experience, newbies that follow this pattern rob themselves of getting really good at improving their problem-solving skills, like I was almost trapped into a vicious circle those days.
At Moat Academy, we expose our participants to some problem-solving methods; among them are heuristics and algorithms, and we emphasize algorithms as the best method in programming (more on this to come in this article).
Career, not job:
When you set out to become a software developer/engineer, you are on a career journey, and it is not just for merely getting a job. Most newbies think so narrowly, and their focus is just about the job. A job is just to make ends meet (most times ephemeral or stagnating), while on the other hand, a career is a lifelong journey (progressive). At Moat Academy, we spend time to take our participants on these distinctions (it is almost a week-long discussion in our career session).
Programming skills open up a wide range of career opportunities with the advent of the 4th Revolution technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, data engineering, cybersecurity, and so on. One major and common prerequisite at their entry point is programming skills. If you miss the why while learning, you are likely to miss out on transitioning into any of these fields (even if you wish to).
Why?
I remember in my early days at the university, when we were introduced to science, technology, and engineering. A catchphrase was used to bring us to distinguish these three as we were sojourning (which to date sticks with me):
Science tells why.
Technology tells how
Engineering makes
If you are coming into this field from any background, please don’t miss out on the above: this is sequential.
Generative AI tools are made by those that know the why and the how, because they follow this sequence: their journey started from why (after all, generative AI relies on and are built on algorithms) … Anyone who does not know the why, would be confined to becoming a mere ‘user of tools,’ or, better put in today’s parlance, a prompt engineer!
To also have the power to push the frontier of technologies like creating tools such as the ones provided for us today. You need not skip the why!
At Moat Academy, we focus on the why and the how not only on the mere expediency of making it work.
Do you want to explore the journey of becoming a thoroughbred software engineer? Join us at Moat Academy!
Written by Oyebola ( April, 2025)
