davidbau.com Does Computer Science Still Exist?

But my NetHack experience suggests something different. The skills that matter at scale are somehow still about programming, but they are not coding skills. They are: deciding what to build. Figuring out what to test and how to know if the tests are honest. Building tools that make invisible things visible. Managing coordination across agents. Knowing when a metric is a figleaf. Recognizing where the real complexity lives in a system, and routing attention there instead of everywhere else. These are the conceptual skills that have always been underneath large-scale programming. They are the hard part that the mechanical craft obscured. The reality is that CS has never really been about writing code. Underneath coding is critical thinking about algorithms, engineering principles, analytical methods. It is the science of managing complexity, and code is just the medium we manage it in. In the era of AI code generation, the field does not die. It transforms.