As artificial intelligence quietly rewrites the economics of software development—generating three-quarters of Google's new code and potentially 95 percent of all code by 2030—a deeper question surfaces beneath the noise: not whether machines can write instructions, but whether humans still need to understand them. Microsoft's answer, offered without hesitation, is that foundational coding knowledge has become more essential precisely because someone must judge, direct, and take responsibility for what the machines produce. The skill has not been made redundant; it has been elevated from craft