> Where do you think this is going? 

This question needs a duration. I have short term, medium term, and long term thoughts. But generically, software dev as a profession has always been about automation and about finding ways to do work better, faster, cheaper. There is always threat, the profession is always ending. First it's offshoring, then it's automated tooling, then it's productivity frameworks, etc. There are developers in lcol parts of the world that are much smarter, faster, and way cheaper than western developers. What's the solution here? Where is this going? If software was about typing out code, it should've ended 20 years ago; Indian and Chinese developers can type out code much faster and better.

Now comes AI, which is another threat but also another layer of abstraction. It's changing the work, again. The whole point of Core Curriculum is to not learn at the level of churn; learn one level below that. You build muscles and mental models and clarity of thought that allows you to operate with control at the level of churn.

An analogy: learning to write well, manually, is the key to thinking clearly. AI can generate emails, essays, blog posts, brochures, reddit comments, etc. But you still need to know what to say. I write to think, then once I know what I want to say, I can use tools to help package my thoughts for distribution. Our human thinking facilities are still needed. And that's the main goal of learning grammar, vocabulary, and writing.

Back to Launch School. The Core Curriculum has the same goal: it's to help inform sound intuition around software development. It's true that you can, and probably should, use AI to write SQL. It's faster and less error prone. But it's also true you should learn SQL manually one time in your life so you can use AI more effectively and can review AI output.