[fastball]

What I meant by "will they?" was "will they any more than a human already needs to in order to understand other humans?"

I don't think this is legibly that different from human behavior, so if new graduates didn't need those things now why would they need them later (or vice versa).

[soulofmischief]

It's probably true that many programmers in the future will get away with a similar lack of fundamental knowledge that today's programmers get away with. To some degree, we all have blind spots, but I think if agentic processes are here to stay, as long as humans remain in the loop at all it would serve us to master a semantic capability closer to that of the models we work with, lest we lose control either in taste or in a manner more serious. The most effective engineers will understand that.