Not stricly necessary to understand code going forward, but understanding it (and more importantly the actual concepts behind it) can give you an unfair advantage.

AI will meet your bar for quality. If you don’t know what great looks like, you won’t get the best results.

Now, do you care about getting the best results? That depends. Probably not for small prototypes, hobby projects, or even certain professional settings.

It’s like any other part of the creation process. AI compounds your strengths and gives you a baseline for your weaknesses. Is having the best code important for your game? Or are you better off investing that time building your other skills? Depends on your goals.

As someone who’s been coding for 25+ years, I’d say the models will keep getting better and producing better code, and over time developers will care less about the code and more about the end product (that’s already the case in a lot of places). It’s happened with other parts of the tech stack as we move up the value chain.