90% of "Senior" Programmers are not very good programmers, but they think that they are, and look down upon "Junior" Programmers.

If you want to program you need to know enough to be compatible with the people who are already there. Historically hiring developers is just about putting bodies in seats.

If you want to be in management soft skills and written communication are more important, but you still have to know enough to call bullshit and ask questions other people are not comfortable asking.

That’s all you need to know.

To the extent that you use AI at all, it should be to accelerate your own understanding in ways that are independently verifiable/falsifiable.

AI amplifies what you are.

If you take shortcuts in your education, you will remain mediocre.

If you dive deep in your understanding, building a broad and deep foundation, then you will be exponentially more powerful.

Enough to get through CS101. Databases, networks, operating systems, and all that hardware will certainly be around. Agents can work through them but the trust deficit will still be present(unless something fundamentally changes). So, learn coding but don't get obsessed with it.

Programming is the art of applying math to solve problems. What kind of problems do you want to work on? That determines how much math to know, and what kind of programming you'll be needing to learn manually before you start offloading morsels to the bot.

Back when starting my career, I always remember the repeated questions of "do you need to be able to code to work in infosec?".

The same applies here and in any other tech field, nobody ever regrets that they learned "too much".

Pick your poison and learn everything you can!

Well, you will be paid for your subjective decision-making, what applies where, system design, and your calculation of trade-offs. Regardless of what scaling laws say, these will remain a problem for humans to solve because real-world systems are messy.

It sounds like you don't know what you want to do for a career ("work in tech" is not the name of a career). Figure that out first, then your question will be answered.

You must still learn how to program. LLMs do not actually know or understand anything, and so they insert mistakes all the time. To ensure the code is good, you have to review it, and you can't review it if you don't understand it. If you don't learn how to program, you're going to be setting yourself up for a world of hurt when the LLM starts doing a bunch of stupid stuff but you don't know enough to catch it.

Also, you didn't ask but: be careful about going into tech. 5-10 years in the future is probably far enough that we will be able to see how the AI craze impacts jobs, but right now it's a very uncertain career which is at risk of going away because the business people think they can just have AI do everything. They can't, and they will learn that the hard way, but that will be cold comfort if you're out of work in the meantime. So be careful about choosing this field, it's hard to know what the career potential is like right now.

depends on the industry .. for 80% of jobs 0 coding knowledge will be needed in 10 years.

for ai research, safety, aerospace, military, trading, gamedev .. those will probably still need coding for a bit longer.