AI tools spark debate over CS fundamentals

This is a perennial "are we getting dumber with better tools" debate, but AI gives it new teeth — the productivity gap between knowing fundamentals and not knowing them has never felt smaller to junior devs.

• –The risk isn't that AI replaces CS knowledge; it's that developers lose the judgment to know when AI output is wrong or brittle
• –Distributed systems and algorithms matter most in failure modes and edge cases — exactly where AI-generated code tends to break silently
• –Senior engineers who understand fundamentals use AI to go faster; junior engineers who skip them use AI to go in the wrong direction faster
• –The debate mirrors earlier waves around ORMs, garbage collection, and managed cloud — fundamentals always resurface when abstractions leak