Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#101

Post by dakiol » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

If it's any consolation, at my company (and others) we have shifted the way we are doing tech interviews: nowadays we focus more on CS/software-engineering fundamentals rather than ability to code. We also still do the systems design interviews (for which fundamentals of networking and design are needed).

We care way less now about leetcode-like interviews (we used to have them before, but not anymore)

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#102

Post by 7bit » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

Hey man it's ok. The motivation to learn stuff should be intrinsic, not extrinsic. There no value learning something that you're not interested in, because it can only be applied to topics that you won't also be interested in. Don't stress it. If you're happy with what AI gives you, it's good enough

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#103

Post by elevation » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

I recently built a brilliant work in my domain by directing LLMs. I used C++ and a knowledge of data structures and algorithms to achieve 3+ orders of magnitude of speed up. I generated custom data structures which I designed to have the fewest instructions possible in the hot path. I used novel non-locking communication schemes between threads.

The LLM did all the coding, but came up with none of this by default. None of the optimizations I envisioned emerged up when I prompted “how could we make this faster?” If I hadn’t been an expert in my field the output wouldn’t have been useful.

Keep studying!

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#104

Post by razodactyl » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:18 AM UTC

nvme0n1p1 wrote: post #36

diven_rastdus wrote: post #35

[dead]

ai slop account

It's not that it's slop; it's that the important message itself is drowned out by the excessive prose.

It's so exhausting to read AI generated comments, that's why it's so easy to spot them ffs.

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#105

Post by RavaniRoshan » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals

#106

Post by sigbottle » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

rerdavies wrote: post #70

ankurdhama wrote: post #15

Did you learn arithmetic in school even though calculator exist?

Interestingly, here in Canada, kids are no longer taught long division. When I was in highschool, we were taught to use slide rules, but not very seriously. And I would imagine, nobody gets taught how to use trigonometry tables anymore (at least I hope so). So, these days, you learn arithmetic very differently because calculators exist.

It's been ages since I long divided lol.... I might not even remember it anymore.

I'd probably do some hacky ass binary search or something (at least for easy integers)