I think the biggest phase transition happened roughly fall of last year with AI adoption. My entire job is now AI orchestration, and then a LOT of my time spent writing the specs/prompts, reviewing and validating the output imperfectly and generally being very paranoid. But it's to a point where no one I know really has a choice but to work like this because doing things by hand is just way slower, even though I find slop to be like nails on a chalkboard. And the "sloppiness" has been getting progressively less sloppy. Reading Google Docs generated by Opus 4.8 is torture, whereas 5.6 can actually write concisely and clearly. So I expect a lot of the paranoia and pain to gradually decrease over time.
That being said, domain knowledge is still very important but you just don't need nearly as much tribal knowledge (because RAG or a tuned LLM can wrangle the chaos of your company documentation) or broad technical knowledge (because if you understand stats and PCA congratulations, when the coding agent recommends probabilistic PCA you now get to learn what it is, why its good for your use case (maybe), and get the gist fairly quickly; you no longer need to know about it in the first place. That was the return on investment for breadth of technical knowledge: knowing what to even look into).
I won't say "the field has moved towards a bigger focus on fundamentals" though -- this is all just one internet person's opinion. No one is telling me this is happening I'm just realizing that these are the muscles I am flexing more nowadays and my deep breadth of technical knowledge muscles are not flexing as much any more. Like: you are now inundated with recommendations of various methods from a coding agent: you need to understand them quickly; fundamentals gives you that. At least I think so, but of course, maybe I'm wrong about this due to misunderstanding the actual skills involved in what I'm doing now.
That being said, domain knowledge is still very important but you just don't need nearly as much tribal knowledge (because RAG or a tuned LLM can wrangle the chaos of your company documentation) or broad technical knowledge (because if you understand stats and PCA congratulations, when the coding agent recommends probabilistic PCA you now get to learn what it is, why its good for your use case (maybe), and get the gist fairly quickly; you no longer need to know about it in the first place. That was the return on investment for breadth of technical knowledge: knowing what to even look into).
I won't say "the field has moved towards a bigger focus on fundamentals" though -- this is all just one internet person's opinion. No one is telling me this is happening I'm just realizing that these are the muscles I am flexing more nowadays and my deep breadth of technical knowledge muscles are not flexing as much any more. Like: you are now inundated with recommendations of various methods from a coding agent: you need to understand them quickly; fundamentals gives you that. At least I think so, but of course, maybe I'm wrong about this due to misunderstanding the actual skills involved in what I'm doing now.