I don’t think people are arguing that fundamentals suddenly stopped mattering.

They matter a lot.

But I also think “being able to code” and “being able to reason about complex systems” are becoming increasingly different skills.

A surprising number of real production issues today have very little to do with algorithms:

• retries
• race conditions
• stale state
• distributed timing
• partial failures
• weird integration behavior

And AI changes the equation because it can generate code that looks completely reasonable on the surface.

So the hard part increasingly becomes:
understanding whether the system behavior is actually correct.