Musings are shorter-form observations. Captured closer to the moment of the thought. Less polished. More honest.

I was driving this morning and this landed on me: intro computer science education is becoming the Dewey Decimal System.

You remember being taught the Dewey Decimal System. Maybe you even remember the librarian who treated it like sacred knowledge. And then the internet happened, and we quietly stopped teaching it, and nobody had a funeral because the skill had become genuinely obsolete. The tool ate it.

That is what is happening to CS 101 right now. Not to computer science as a discipline. To the entry-level, learn-to-code, here-is-a-for-loop tier of programming education. AI can write that code. Faster, with fewer bugs, in any language you point it at. The execution skill is being commoditized in real time.

"The ACT banned calculators because arithmetic execution was the thing being tested. When they let calculators in, they were admitting that arithmetic execution was no longer the thing worth measuring."

Think about the calculator argument. For decades, standardized tests banned calculators because the skill being assessed was arithmetic. You needed to be able to execute the calculation. Then, gradually, the argument shifted: what we actually care about is whether you can reason mathematically, set up the problem correctly, know which operation to apply. The calculator handles execution. We want to test judgment.

So they let calculators in. The world did not end. Math education did not collapse. It shifted. The thing being tested changed because the thing that mattered changed.

The same argument is now airtight for basic programming. The AI handles execution. What actually matters is whether you can reason about systems, identify what needs to be built, and recognize when the output is wrong. Those are judgment skills, not execution skills.

What Actually Matters Now

I am not a software engineer. I have never written production code in my life. What I have done is talk a Principal Engineer at a major technology company through his own product's architectural gaps, using restaurant operations as the diagnostic framework. He validated the findings, shared unreleased roadmap details, and asked me to schedule a call.

I did that without writing a single line of code. I did it by understanding systems well enough to reason about them, ask the right questions, and recognize where the assumptions were wrong.

That is the skill. Not syntax. Not memorizing library functions. The ability to hold a mental model of a system, identify where it breaks against reality, and articulate that clearly enough that the people who write the code can act on it.

The institutions teaching tier-one computer classes as vocational training are teaching people to be human calculators. The AI already does that. The question is what you build on top of it.

Reasoning. Systems thinking. Domain expertise deep enough to know when the output is wrong.

That is what the calculator cannot replace. And the Dewey Decimal System cannot teach you.