Why people should learn to code by hand: it's a mechanism for learning and teaching. In much the same way you should still learn calculus, even if writing it by hand isn't that "useful" for your career. @karpathy's series on llm's is a wonderful example (it's incredible btw). Come in knowing a little calc AND python and you'll get a ton out of it very quickly. Following this would be much harder not knowing operator overloading, FP arithmetic, classes, etc. The future is not writing python, rust, or asm by hand. But just like learning mathematical notation, grokking one or a few PLs well is a foundation on which you can build a lot of other deep knowledge, and gain a strong sense of computing systems.