Giving yourselves breadcrumbs to knowledge is a fantastic life skill... but one that may (even more) fall out of favor with AI replacing the value. If I suddenl

Giving yourselves breadcrumbs to knowledge is a fantastic life skill... but one that may (even more) fall out of favor with AI replacing the value. If I suddenly need to add a caching layer and have learned nothing about it I can ask AI to give me an overview and go ahead and recommend the best solution for my codebase and situation. Yes, you may miss some subtly and have to flail around to ask the right questions, but there is no doubt the value of "shallow technical knowledge" is less important. What will remain important or grow in importance is general curiosity. Connecting completely disparate ideas or ways of thinking will lead you to new creative thoughts or solutions that AI would never produce because everyone else is working from the same standard ideas. I was an English major in college and took classes in politics, philosophy, math, language, etc. based on personal interest. And I ended up as an engineer (with my trusty CS minor). TI've met several developers who have had a similar background and they tend to become the most well-rounded and business-aware ones on the team. I worry that this shift to higher cost/higher stakes/higher competition education is making this approach to learning feel untenable and my approach of 20 years ago comes across as totally irresponsible. But I would argue American education is leading to a factory approach at exactly the time when "structured thinking" is being fully replaced by AI. What is the value of crushing leetcode nowadays? Better to have a dev that has some intuition as to why people aren't clicking that new button.