I give this advice to everyone today. I’m sure I’ve saved DAYS of work by having not-so-fancy but useful macros for data/image processing. I started playing with programming a few years ago. Start easy and you won’t regret it in the future :)
If you want to become a (better) scientist, learn to program. Even if they tell you, "You don't have to because AI will do it for you," learn to program anyway. Hours spent processing data and text often become minutes, thanks to a bit of code, even if you're a newbie in coding
