Do You Still Need Computer Science in the Age of AI

"Maybe I Should Become a Welder" A colleague recently told me about a conversation with someone at Amazon. The person described how the company is aggressively pushing AI tools for code generation — management pressure to move faster, ship more, spend less. My colleague, twenty years in the industry, went quiet afterward. "Maybe I should learn welding," he joked. It was only half a joke. I get it. When you've spent twenty years in this profession and keep hearing that any intern with Copilot will soon do the same thing — it hits not your skills, but your identity. The sense that everything you've learned actually mattered. Amazon, like any large company, has plenty of strong engineers who've given years to the craft and understand exactly what's happening. But popular opinion doesn't make distinctions: why learn algorithms if AI will write them? Why bother with design patterns if Claude or Copilot can generate a working service in an hour? Why understand how a hash table works when the