Question: “I read the statement credited to Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, who said that teenagers should spend time doing vibe coding. I want to know if that is the best way to help my son be ready for AI opportunities of the future.
My Response: Alexandar Wang is a billionaire prodigy, and when such people speak, the world listens. Truth be told, if one must default to a view, it would be his and not that of a village boy from Ovim. Yet, let me offer a perspective as a teacher who has walked in the corridors of Johns Hopkins (PhD in robotics in ECE) and Carnegie Mellon University, ranked #1 in AI and Robotics in America (faculty in EC engineering)
When I began my doctoral program at Johns Hopkins, I was not proficient in some coding languages. But I was very good at mathematics. In one assignment, we were asked to model the insertion of a needle during minimally invasive surgery of a throat, supported by a robot. I solved the mathematics with elegance, while my partner wrote the code.
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The professor, upon discovering this division of labor, asked me to join his lab immediately—not because I coded, but because I understood the mathematics that powered the coding. At Carnegie Mellon, the cradle of modern AI, the emphasis has always been Mathematics, Statistics, and Mechanics. These are constants. Programming languages are variables; new ones will emerge, and old ones will fade. But mathematics never fades.
That is why, while Alexandar is correct that vibe coding (using natural language to interface with AI) is useful, it is not sufficient. Vibe coding makes you a smart consumer of AI, not a creator of AI. Creation requires logic, numbers, and physics. Simply, if your teen only learns vibe coding, he or she will be limited to mastering how to speak to AI, without the deeper ability to create AI.
So, hear me well: if you want your child to thrive in the grand AI creation, let him or her master mathematics and physics. Support him or her to think in logic, to manipulate complex numbers, and to love statistics. Prompts are simply logic expressed in natural language. And logic remains the bedrock of natural philosophy.
In the Igbo Nation, we say, “onye amaghi ebe mmiri bidoro maba ya, agaghi ama ebe ? kw?s?” [he who does not know where the rain began to beat him will not know where it dried]. The foundation of AI is not vibe coding; it is mathematics. If your child has that foundation, he or she will not only consume AI—he will create it.
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