[porcoda]

I work in a subfield of CS that requires those fundamentals pretty regularly, and I also make regular use of AI tools. You definitely need those fundamentals because AI tools can’t always be trusted to make good decisions when it comes to them. Knowing the fundamentals yourself is critical to keep the AI assistants in check, both to know how to guide them AND to know to recognize when they made a bad decision.

A recent example for me: I had a challenging problem in a medium sized codebase (tens of thousands of lines) that boiled down to performing some updates to a complex data structure where the updates needed to be constrained by some properties of the overall structure to maintain invariants. Maintaining the invariants while the data structure was being updated is tricky since naive approaches would required repeated traversals of the whole structure. That would be really inefficient, and a smarter approach would try to localize the work during the updates. The latest Claude and GPT assistants recognized this, but their solutions were exceptionally complex and brittle. I eventually solved it myself with a significantly simpler and more robust method (both AIs even gleefully agreed that my solution was slick after I did it).

Had I let my CS fundamentals go to waste I wouldn’t have been able to solve it myself, nor would I have been able to recognize that the solutions posed by the models were needlessly complex.

Just because an AI can generate a solution that passes tests quickly doesn't mean what it generated is a long term good solution. Your skills in fundamentals is key to recognizing when it does a good job and when it doesn’t, and being able to guide it in the right direction.