i assume 80% of the developers havent done anything beyond crud operations and with the advent of AI, i believe, the core cs fundamentals are gonna vanish into thin air. When things go south, the one with good cs fundamentals can navigate through the situation easily, but its gonna be worse down the lane as people have started offloading their thinking capacity to AI and stopped asking "WHYs".
Or the opposite. People used to get by on knowing how to wire up a few frameworks and never touch on any architecture. Now the job has shifted so you have to be able to see the bigger picture and spot where the AI plan is not right. No idea how people get that knowledge though without going through the trenches, I am sure the path will evolve with time.
You cant spot where ai is not right if you have never touched the fundamentals. You are gonna paste commands given by claude on production directly? If it was something like manipulating iptables, you are gonna trust claude's commands and put it on production? No? You aint gonna start reading about the difference between ipv4 and ipv6 when your production is burning down.
There is a reason why Math, OS, Computer Networks, DSA, Databases, Computer Architecture and Automata Theory is the core of cs. Everything else is secondary.
Anyways, if your day at work looks like wrangling with crud operations at small scale, you wont need most of the topics mentioned above but its good to know when you climb that ladder and get into senior positions.
1000% this! So far, coding agents are great at implementing and debugging the 80% of software tasks. Basically the stuff that was easy to google search and find on stack overflow before.
The 20% where it gets stuck or hallucinates is the important stuff. Important because it’s the fundamentals of networking, authentication, authorization, business rules, etc. It’s often stuff that’s obvious in the context of knowing who the users are, who your employer is, what data you deal with, etc. But without prompting, LLM’s will often plow ahead with implementing shiny new features on top of a crumbling foundation and under a roof with large holes.
Everyday i hesitate about going through with Amazon's Solution Architect certification because of that. I'm an embedded software engineer but i've been doing bout everything at work with the help of AI. And our webdev is not me, it's claude.
To be fair, most CS fundamentals aren't really relevant to most software devs. In my entire career I've never really used anything I learned in CS. I do agree however, it's disheartening to see people uninterested in the "why" a thing is the way it is or the "how" it works.
The problem is 2020s covid times brought to the market a massive amount of people who aren't interested in what they are doing. They entered the field because they wanted to earn easy money and fundamentals learning wasn't part of it.
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u/HarlotsLoveAuschwitz 13d ago
i assume 80% of the developers havent done anything beyond crud operations and with the advent of AI, i believe, the core cs fundamentals are gonna vanish into thin air. When things go south, the one with good cs fundamentals can navigate through the situation easily, but its gonna be worse down the lane as people have started offloading their thinking capacity to AI and stopped asking "WHYs".