Comment by stackghost
8 days ago
> Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background.
This, to me, is the biggest differentiator. In terms of results, there's a huge yawning chasm between the person who says "Claude make me a $thing" versus the person who puts in the effort to lay down the overall architecture, gives some thoughts to libraries and dependencies, performance trade-offs etc, and only then begins prompting.
Knowing how to implement Djikstra or a linked list by heart is no longer important. Actual software engineering skills are more important than ever.
> Knowing how to implement Djikstra or a linked list by heart is no longer important.
This was never important. The important part was always knowing when to use them.
Even more narrow - you only need to know when to consider them.
I only ever bothered remembering enough of any algorithm to know my options and a few rules of thumb. If I ever actually need to consider the details of the algorithm, I certainly need to spend a lot more time thinking through the problem and its solution. Knowing a specific algorithm well enough to pump out in 15 minutes is a party trick that is as useful as being able to change a tire in 3 minutes flat. A great time saver that will be functionally useful maybe 3 times in your life...
>The important part was always knowing when to use them.
Two things can be true simultaneously. I think there was a time when deep familiarity with implementing algorithms was important.
always was. Still is.
It is for coding interviews
The gap is closing; a shitty wannabe programmer will eventually learn the structures one way or another. Agentic coding just got many new people involved, and these new people create noise.