Claude is genuinely impressive, but it doesn t remove the need to understand programming fundamentals. You still need to know how systems connect, where data lives, how state is managed, what environments are (dev vs staging vs production), how deployments work, and how things actually run (& fail) in the real world.

For developers, Claude is an incredible accelerator. For non-programmers, it can feel magical at first, but at some point, real engineering knowledge becomes unavoidable.