Ryan Carson spent 25% of his entire life teaching people to code.

He built Treehouse into a $10M+ online coding school, raised $23M, and educated over a million students. Then he watched AI agents start passing competitive coding challenges and shipping production features overnight.

So we asked him: Does the entire way we teach programming in 2026 need to be rebuilt from scratch?

For example, Naval Ravikant just argued that software engineers are now "among the most leveraged people on earth"—but only if they actually understand what's happening under the hood.

His point: all abstractions are leaky, AI agents will make mistakes, and you need real engineering knowledge to catch the bugs, optimize performance, and build something that actually wins. There's no demand for average.

So the question becomes: what do you need to learn to NOT be average?

Well, in ~10 minutes, we’re going LIVE with Ryan on The Neuron: AI Explained, breaking down:

• What's still essential to learn when agents handle the actual code.

• Where a complete beginner should start in 2026 (hint: not with syntax).

• The new bottleneck nobody talks about—deployment, databases, security, and actually getting your app onto the internet.

• Ryan's 3-file system for building production apps with AI agents (5,000+ GitHub stars on GitHub).

• Why "vibe coding" gets you a prototype—but what does it take to ship a real product?

Ryan knows what he’s talking about. He’s built and sold three companies, and he's currently building Untangle—a real production app—almost entirely with AI tools. He’s also worked as a Builder in Residence at Amp, Sourcegraph's coding agent.

Stream officially starts @ 10:30am PT | 12:30pm ET | 1:30pm ET | 6:30pm GMT

Tuning in late? No worries—watch the recording anytime at the link above.

→ Watch live on YouTube here

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P.S. Got a friend / family member in your life who's been "thinking about learning to code" or “getting really into vibe-coding lately”? Forward this.

Ryan's breakdown of where to actually start in 2026 is aimed to be the most practical advice anyone could give you if you’re just starting in this field in 2026.

Keep scrolling for: a TL;DR on maybe THE COOLEST interview we’ve ever done at The Neuron!

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What are the two most scalable energy sources in the universe? Hint: they both involve stars…

Elon Musk says the first is space-based solar panels (because they capture sunlight 24/7, no clouds, no nighttime, no batteries included; shout out Corey’s favorite robot movie).

The second? Fusion. The same process that powers every star in the sky.

Now consider this: Technically, solar has a ceiling: you're collecting energy from an existing star. Fusion creates it. By smashing hydrogen atoms together at 100 million degrees, you release roughly a million times more energy per unit of fuel than burning coal or gas. The fuel itself? Filtered from seawater (any water, really). It's the closest thing to infinite energy that physics allows.

So why don't we have it yet? Because recreating a star on Earth turns out to be really, really hard (Ya think?) The star keeps wanting to turn itself off.

That's actually the good news. Unlike fission (the nuclear energy we have now, which is "default on" and needs control rods to stop a chain reaction), fusion is "default off." If anything goes wrong, the reaction just… dies. No meltdowns. No Chernobyl. No long-lived radioactive waste. It's so safe that the U.S. regulates fusion machines like particle accelerators, not nuclear reactors.

Last week, we sat down with Brandon Sorbom, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the company that might be closest to making commercial fusion real. CFS has raised nearly $3B, has 1,200 employees, and just installed the first magnet in their demonstration reactor, SPARC.

Why is this interview so awesome? Because Brandon explained the whole thing from scratch for us; no physics degree required:

• What fusion actually is (and why stars are the existence proof that it works).

• "It's like making a sun, but you control the switch".

• Why it was "always 30 years away" (spoiler: fusion progress actually outpaced Moore's Law, the famous observation that computing power roughly doubles every two years, or put another way, the reason your phone today is more powerful than the computers that landed us on the moon).

• The magnet breakthrough that changed everything (new superconductors let them build a reactor 50x smaller than the $30B+ international project in France).

• Why fusion can't melt down (the "default off" explanation is one of the best we've ever heard; when we talked to CFS about this before this interview, they explained it to us like, “fission is about protecting the environment from the reaction; fusion is about protecting the reaction from the environment”).

• Can it compete with natural gas on cost? (Brandon thinks yes, once it climbs down the cost curve from scaling it, and explains the first-principles math).

• The scale required for energy abundance (if CFS pulls this off, it could take roughly 5,000 to 10,000 plants for abundant clean energy, which sounds like a lot until you realize we've already built 20,000+ power plants worldwide).

So what kind of timeline should we anticipate for this? CFS is targeting first plasma in 2027, then grid electricity in the early 2030s (we go more in depth on this in the full article deep dive based on Brandon’s recent AMA).

What does this all have to do with AI? Well, AI is actually helping build this thing. Google DeepMind is building AI systems to control the plasma in real time, and NVIDIA & Siemens are creating digital twins of the reactor to speed up experiments by 100x.

If it works, fusion will power the AI data centers that helped build it. And if that fusion power works, it could make the cost of powering desalination plants trivial, scaling an entirely new water source for the world. The most elegant flywheel in tech.

If you only learn about one non-AI technology this year, make it fusion. This conversation is the best starting point we've found.

🎧 Listen / Watch:

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Full article deep dive

Dive Deeper into today’s LIVE with these resources:

• Naval on software engineering in the AI age.

• Naval's full interview.

• Ryan Carson's website.

• Ryan's articles on agent workflows.

• Code Factory workflow.

• Agent teams in OpenClaw.

• Agents that ship while you sleep.

• Ryan's newsletter.

• Untangle.

And if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do! Click the image below to go to our channel and hit “subscribe” to get notified right when new videos go live.

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Stay curious,

The Neuron Team

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