[tudelo]

I am rather positive that if you were sat down in a room and couldn't leave unless you did some mildly complicated long division, you would succeed. Just because it isn't a natural thing anymore and you have not done the drills in decades doesn't mean the knowledge is completely lost.

[pmarreck]

If you are concerned that embedding "from first-principles" reasoning in widely-available LLM's may create future generations that cannot, then I share your concern. I also think it may be overrated. Plenty of people "do division" without quite understanding how it all works (unfortunately).

And plenty of people will still come along who love to code despite AI's excelling at it. In fact, calling out the AI on bad design or errors seems to be the new "code golf".