Read this article from the Bun people about how they used CS fundamentals (and that way of thinking) to improve Bun install's performance.

https://bun.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-bun-install

Then look at how Anthropic basically Acquihired the entire Bun team. If the CS fundamentals didn't matter, why would they?

Even Anthropic needs people that understand CS fundamentals, even though pretty much their entire team now writes code using AI.

And since then, Jared Sumner has been relentlessly shaving performance bottlenecks from claude code. I have watched startup times come way down in the past couple months.

Sumner might be using CC all day too. But an understanding of those fundamentals (more a way of thinking rather than specific algorithms) still matter.