Could you elaborate more? What would those said foundations and fundamentals be ?

In a nutshell, a lot more understanding of how computers work, and how that affects software design.

From theory like Order(n), 3rd Normal Form, P versus NP, Recursion, Logic (including bit logic) etc, to practical things like exploration of language (why languages are different, why that doesn't matter), how Operating Systems actually work (and what they do), how Networks work (their strengths and weaknesses and thus impact on software design) and so on.

Obviously I can't list a 4 year syllabus[1] here, and it would be different for each college. IME colleges don't teach programming past the first couple weeks, although it is the basis for assignments and evaluation for the next 4 years. (In the way that grade school doesn't teach writing after year 1, but you write a lot in the next 10 years.)

[1] All of this can be self taught. There's plenty of text books and materials online. But basically self-taught people learn programming, not theory, and lack the "path" of a formal syllabus.

Each school will of course have a different syllabus, and some will offer selective modules as well focusing on specific areas like graphics, compilers, databases etc.

Although I do understand the analogy being made here. But I suspect OP much like myself is hoping for concrete suggestions. To my mind argument is Software Jobs will shrink and only the very elites will be valuable aka the recent Meta's 10s of millions of offers. But for the rest of average Joes it will be harsh job market or even non existent. So what can the average programmer do , concretely.

A concrete proposal? Become an Auditor, not an Author.

As AI generates billions of lines of code, the world is about to be flooded with "technical debt" and "security holes." The scarcity shifts from writing code to verifying it.

Concrete Action: Shift your skill set towards security auditing, compliance, and system architecture verification. Position yourself as the "Digital Notary" who stamps the AI's work with a human guarantee.

When a bank (like mine) lends money to a software project, we don't ask "Did an AI write this?" We ask "Which human is going to jail if this fails?"

Be the person whose name is on the insurance policy. That is a job an algorithm can never take.

I for one am afraid and this keeps me awake at night, the general take on HNers always seems to be oh you are only doing mundane tasks, AI can't do what I do. Which is partly true, but claude code has improved leaps and bounds almost exponentially at least from my subjective usage. My solution is to just save and invest aggressively and grind DSA to get a higher paying job as I don't see myself in the elites that these discussions are full of. I really am a mediocre prgrammer

You could take a look at sourcegraph Cody

Took your suggestion and just applied. Just curious though, why the recommendation ?

Hey looks super interesting, would definitely try it out. Having worked in a similar VC funded big Api Dev Platform, would love to hear your thoughts on how the team is planning to address eventual enshittification due to VC pressures.

Hey, looks like a great fit for me. I have led teams to $1M MRR, owned the entire infrastrucutre for more than 60 microservices. delivered lots of large scale projects from scratch.

However the application form asks for current and expectation without mentioning the budget which to me at least is a negative signal.

After having implemened many complex distributed state machines I started thinking along the terms of how do abstract away the engineering part of it and provide a platform for writing business logic. Technical term for it is workflow orchestration. You might have heard of AWS Step functions.

Check out Temporal, it's open source and lot of architecture videos exist. I've been trying to experiment with it to rewrite my old projects using it.

Thank you, I will read up on this today. If you have any resources that you thought were a particularly valuable read, please don't hesitate to drop the links here.

Have used this feature, works exactly like this. However it is a hit or miss, most of the incoming recruiters/companies are far below my standards. The best way to use LinkedIn is to send out requests to engineers where I want to work and ask for referrals. It's important to do your homework on the role, company, and person. Most of the people are happy to refer if you do this.