Is 42 Still Worth it in The Age of AI?

AI can already write code, fix bugs and put together a working app in a few minutes. So why spend years learning to do it? Our honest answer? There has never been a better time to learn, as long as you learn the right things.

What AI Really Changes 

Every big shift in technology has followed the same pattern. First come predictions of doom and mass unemployment. Then jobs change shape far more often than they vanish. AI looks set to go the same way. The World Economic Forum expects 170 million new jobs to be created worldwide by 2030 and 92 million to be displaced, a net gain of 78 million, with technology among the main drivers.Writing code line by line matters less than it used to. Nevertheless, designing a system that holds up, checking what a model produces and spotting when it’s confidently wrong matters a lot more.

You can’t do any of that without solid fundamentals. You also need to be comfortable figuring things out on your own, which is the whole idea behind peer learning at 42. It can feel disorienting at first, but it builds exactly the kind of independence and judgment employers keep asking for and that AI can’t replace.

How AI Fits Into the 42 Curriculum

AI at 42 isn’t a bonus module tacked on at the end. Students meet it gradually, starting with how these systems actually work before building their own. The goal is for them to understand what’s happening under the hood, the whole idea is that they can keep up when today’s tools are replaced by new ones.

The core of it is three projects. In the first, students build tools that turn plain language into structured API calls, and get them to produce valid output every single time, even on small, inexpensive models. In the second, they build a RAG system, which lets an AI answer questions from a specific set of documents instead of making things up. It’s the approach most companies rely on when they put AI to work on their own data. In the third, they create autonomous agents that think through a problem, write code, look at the result and correct themselves, then test them on SWE-bench, one of the reference benchmarks in the field.

So no, it isn’t a ChatGPT tutorial. It’s real engineering work, and pretty close to what tech companies are hiring for.

Are 42 Students AI-Ready?

The answer is yes. Our Alumni are already working on various AI challenges in companies at the forefront of innovation. OpenAI, NVIDIA, Google, AWS, Apple and Accenture…

Our students also like a challenge. This year alone, 42 Paris took first and third place at the Gemini AI Hackathon, a student from 42 Heilbronn won the IPAI x HI! PARIS Hackathon, and 42 Prague finished first at DigiEduHack out of 800 projects, where they had to tackle how to use AI to help schools optimize their resources using AI.

Earlier this year, we asked AI professionals what they thought of 42 students. And guess what? They love them too.

42 Prague’s winning team at the Digi-Eduhack.

So, is it Still Worth it?

More than ever. AI hasn’t replaced tech professionals. It has raised the bar for them.  The people who do best are the ones who understand how these systems work and can build them, question them and improve them, including the ones that don’t exist yet. That’s why 42 is not just a coding school. It’s a school where you learn to face the unknown.