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Teaching Code in the AI Era: Why Fundamentals Still Matter

Ali Spittel on April 04, 2025

As someone who has spent the last decade leading developer relations teams, teaching at coding bootcamps, and working as a professional software en...
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Tyler V.

Always a good day when there's a new Ali post on Dev πŸ₯³

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Ali Spittel

aw, it's been a few years since i've really created content, but it is so nice when i'm able to. thank you!

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Anmol Baranwal

I believe the software dev space is changing really fast and AI has definitely made a decent impact.

Back in my early college days, I used to search everything on Stack Overflow and still struggled... it’s much easier to code these days.

If someone starts without clear fundamentals.. yes they can code and build things.. but when something goes seriously wrong, they will have no idea what to do.. (trust me, in most cases it will) because they didn't have the understanding of the codebase to begin with.

And someone who's okay with "vibe coding" might not understand this.. because they're not at that stage yet.

Awesome article!

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Ndeye Fatou Diop

Love this post! Without strong fundamentals, it is tough to debug code.

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Abdul Rafay

AI is fun and all but if you core concepts are not clear ten even AI can't help you.

here is the cool thing I have see if you want to do vibe coding then your role changes from a Dev to a Project manager and when your are in that domain then you do need to have a good vision and concepts should be clear.

If you more detail insight checkout my blog on my website: rafay99.com/blog/rise-of-vibe-coding/

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Bashir Anakobe

Timely and meaningful content. Thanks

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Future_Developer

Beautifully written article! Thank you for sharing your perspective with us.

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Asim Saeed

The content is nice.

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Isaac Klutse

Great Article, Lot of knowledge in one article.

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Kevin Asutton

Great Post!!!!

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eerk

I do think coders have to re-invent themselves, and learn how to become really good at using AI tools in their workflow. I'm quite amazed how little code I actually type these days.