The Neuron: AI Explained
GPT 5.4 LIVE Test & Learn to Code in 2026: What's Essential vs. What AI Handles Now
06 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the significance of AI in today's coding landscape?
here with grant as always and our special guest today ryan carson how you doing ryan hey yo doing well um it's an exciting day in ai day like every day in ai day for real no joke we were just talking this morning i said i hope when ipos happen it doesn't lose its fun yeah but it's going to i'm afraid there's there's so much ai stuff happening it's just so it's what an exciting time to be alive but also
It's like slightly exhausting. Yeah. Yes. Double. We both feel that because I agree. Well, before we dive in here real quick, I want to make sure everyone who's here knows that we just launched a giveaway in partnership with NVIDIA.
So if you go to the link that's about to pop into the chat and sign up for any one GTC session and attend it, you can enter for a chance to win a free DGX Spark provided by NVIDIA. that I'm salivating over, to be fair. I want that. Can I just leave and join the audience and win that? Drop. Oh, my gosh. Oh, pretty cool. More to come on that later, though. Just wanted to drop that in.
Grant, I'll pass over to you. Yeah, yeah. So I want to introduce Ryan properly for folks who don't know him. But before we do, I also want to acknowledge the elephant in the room. GBG 5.4 just dropped. We will be talking about it. Hopefully, Ryan, it sounds like Ryan's already got it queued up in his codec. So hopefully, we can play with it as we go.
And maybe we'll talk benchmarks and stuff after we go through what we have scheduled. So it's exciting. All right, so for people who don't know Ryan Carson, he is awesome. So, uh, Ryan Carson has, uh, built and sold three different companies that I know of maybe more. Um, he's taught 1 million people how to code with his company tree house.
And most recently he's actually building another product himself. called Untangle. Maybe you're building multiple things. You can tell us everything that you're working on. But the thing that really inspired this livestream was I was watching a really great episode you did with Greg Eisenberg, and you were talking about the fact how you used to teach people how to code with Treehouse.
And I was so taken aback by that because I was like, how would you teach the next one million people how to code today in 2026 when AI can basically do the coding for you? and ask you this, and you generously decided to come on the show. So I will hand it over to you, and we're going back to school, so everybody get your pencils out. Ryan Carson, how would you teach people how to code in 2026?
Oh, boy, that is the question. But thanks for having me on the show, and thanks for your very generous intro. It's fun to be here. And what a time to be alive, you know, when you can think and therefore build. So, you know, so this all started back in high school. So actually earlier than that, so my dad brought home an Apple IIe computer, and I was like, cool, what is that?
Um, you know, I started playing with it and, and for those of you remember, there was games like Zork, which were basically text only, you know, and you started to realize, gosh, that you can create these worlds, you know, with, with code and text and, and, um, and I, I thought about, I played these games, but didn't really connect the dots that like, maybe I could create these things.
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Chapter 2: How can beginners approach coding in 2026?
You have to know about computer science. Well, who knows about computer science? Like, privileged people, people that already have computers, like... So, so this door is closed. Um, and I thought it shouldn't be closed. I think everybody should have, it should know about this door and be able to walk through it. Um, so that's when I, I, after drop send was acquired, I switched to education.
Um, you know, let's teach people how to code. Um, and it was primitive at first. We literally started like in person, we would run these workshops, teach people how to code in person, you know, 30 people in a room. Um, And amazingly smart people led those things, like Cal Henderson, the creator of Slack. He taught a PHP class for us. So that was a lot of fun and interesting.
And then we realized, well, this doesn't really scale and really change the world. I mean, we're just teaching 30 people at a time in a room somewhere. And so we decided to build an online school. And that became Treehouse. All that's to say, learning how to code was pretty straightforward until large language models. You would take a course. You would read about it. You would look at the code.
You would type it. You would try to run it. It would break. And you would just do that over and over again. And now in a world where you have this infinite patient, kind, all-knowing tutor... you know, for either free or 20 bucks a month. Yeah. Quality does differ a little bit between those two. So you got to be careful a little bit. So it is shocking what you can get for $20, though.
I think that's underappreciated.
Well, even now for free, it's sort of like, gosh, you know, I will say, though, like if you're listening to this and you are on a free version of any of these tools, I would highly recommend you cancel Netflix or cancel, you know, whatever thing you've got that's taking up your 20 bucks and pay for, you know, one of these tools, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude, because it really does make a difference.
It's like we live in a world now where it's like you have these tutors running around. You do not want the free tutor. You want the tutor you're going to pay. It's really important. I just want to shout out before we jump into any deeper on this. Someone in the chat, LearnAI.gg said, I used Team Treehouse in 2017 to 2018 and landed a job. after completing the front-end nano degree. Thanks, Ryan.
From making $7.25 at McDonald's to making way more now. Dude, that is awesome. Yay. That literally gives me goosebumps. That's the whole reason we started that business, right? So good job, LearnAI.gg. I mean, that's literally the whole point. You can do these things. And now you really can. Yeah.
I think it kind of, then you have to step back and say, well, what is the difference between people that are agentic themselves? Like say, I can learn this. I'm going to go ask an agent to help me do it versus, you know, how do I do these things? And I don't know, you know, what separates those two, but. Yeah, that's a good question.
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