It is not that deep understanding is not valuable, it is that the Rube Goldberg machine of software development is so broad and big that even if you have deep understanding of some part of it, you still need to lean on a lot of other parts to make it work. The skill to have is not only deep understanding of some part, but also the ability to gain deep understanding of other parts if the need arises.
AI, in its current version, will only make this worse, as the solutions it generates are messier and more complex than what a human with deep understanding would create. This is the same as that company were a non-programmer created an Excel sheet that automated something and a few years later the whole company runs on it. It works well until it doesn’t. And then a lot people with deep understanding are needed to untangle the mess.
It is not that deep understanding is not valuable, it is that the Rube Goldberg machine of software development is so broad and big that even if you have deep understanding of some part of it, you still need to lean on a lot of other parts to make it work. The skill to have is not only deep understanding of some part, but also the ability to gain deep understanding of other parts if the need arises.
AI, in its current version, will only make this worse, as the solutions it generates are messier and more complex than what a human with deep understanding would create. This is the same as that company were a non-programmer created an Excel sheet that automated something and a few years later the whole company runs on it. It works well until it doesn’t. And then a lot people with deep understanding are needed to untangle the mess.