Fundamentals used to be essential. Now they’re not just a competitive advantage, they’re the only advantage.
You might be a master of the latest AI editor, but after nearly two decades of building “by hand”, I’ve learned that tools evolve, principles endure.
Nothing replaces:
- Mastery of data structures and algorithms
- Understanding database fundamentals
- Concurrency control
- Knowledge of C
- Information representation
- Grasp of digital electronics
You can’t debug by trial and error. You need to reason about failure modes, understand trade-offs and design for complexity.
AI democratises coding, but makes deep understanding more valuable.
The fundamentals aren’t going anywhere!