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

It used to be that you had to have a strong understanding of the underlying machine in order to create software that actually worked.

Things like cycle times of instructions, pipeline behavior, registers and so on. You had to, because compilers weren‘t good enough. Then they caught up.

You used to manage every byte of memory, utilized every piece of underlying machinery like the different chips, DMA transfers and so on, because that‘s what you had to do. Now it‘s all abstracted away.

These fundamentals are still there, but 99,9% of developers neither care nor bother with them. They don’t have to, unless they are writing a compiler or kernel, or just because it‘s fun.

I think what you‘re describing is also going to go away in the future. Still there, but most developers are going to move up one level of abstraction.

>> watching the difference in a non-CS versus a CS person using an LLM is all you need to do to reaffirm belief that fundamentals are still a massive benefit, if not a requirement for the deeper software.

For now? I'm a CS grad. My son wants to be a CS grad. I'd like to believe what you wrote, and hope it is true. But at the current rate of LLM improvement, would this really be the case in 4yrs? Asking seriously as my son needs to choose a major in 4yrs.

When I utilize LLMs for coding, it makes me think that I have no idea how I'd use it if I was not an expert already.

I don't even care about the tooling, because I get to choose whether I use it or not. Sometimes I first:

1. Summarize a page with gemini 2. Then go through it myself to see if I understand the entire page

Which can help a bit with getting up to speed.

What I'm demotivated by is all these new HN posts that are blatantly using LLMs to write, and then hiding the fact they are. Just be honest... There's nothing wrong with making a mistake, you learn from those.

I get that there's a rule against it now, but it will only filter out low-hanging fruit. I still see too many, and I don't think people will ever change in this sense.

80% of my comments lately have been about spotting these posts/comments and I feel like its not doing anything except getting me mad.

Now I can do shit fast. An LLM will turn any funky idea I have into an MVP within minutes.

Just last night I was struggling browsing / organising media on my NAS, because macOS Samba + NFS suck: "What if I build a bespoke web application I can run on the NAS to do this"

One episode of SNL and two episodes of Graham Norton Show later I had a Dockerized Vite + Go application where I can mount media directories to and browse pictures + videos with previews. It's not 100% done, but close enough for me to see if it's something I need to spend time working on

...but I can also learn stuff - by asking the LLM to teach me.

While that one was building, I stole an idea I saw on the internet and started building an agent harness that uses Qwen3.5:9b as a backend to run tools locally. I specifically asked Claude to build it in parts and explain to me how it works step by step.

Now I know a lot more about that than I did yesterday.