> These are people who believe deeply that understanding code at a fundamental level is non-negotiable. They can spot inefficient algorithms, they know why certain design patterns exist, they understand the underlying systems well enough to debug problems that AI tools can't handle.

What about the people who just want to have a pretty good idea of what the actual code is doing? Like, at a highish level, such as "reading some Typescript and understanding roughly how React/Redux will execute it." Not assembly, not algorithms development, but just nuts and bolts "how does data flow through this system." AI is great at making a good stab at common cases, but if you never sit down and poke through the actual code you are at best divining from shadows on the cave wall (yes it's shadows all the way down, but AI is so leaky that it can't really be considered an abstraction).

Just the other day I had GPT 4o spit out extremely plausible looking SQL that "faked" the join condition because two tables didn't have a simple foreign key relationship, so it wrote out

    select * from table_a 
    JOIN
    table_b ON table_b.name = 'foo'