Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

While AI tools and agentic engineering have advanced significantly, fundamental software engineering principles—including code maintainability, testability, composability, and architectural design—remain critical and cannot be replaced by these technologies. The author argues that LLMs excel at answering "can it be done?" but fall short at the deeper reasoning required for building robust, long-term software systems that are debuggable and well-integrated with other code. True engineering mastery lies in understanding how systems fit together, not just in leveraging AI's generative capabilities.