AI and the disappearing fundamentals

The real danger isn’t that AI will outthink us. It’s that we’ll forget how to think without it.

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
October 13, 2025

 

AI and the disappearing fundamentals

We all learned in high school that if you didn’t nail algebra, you’d never understand calculus. Well, how are future high-end practitioners (e.g., coders, accountants, doctors, executives) supposed to know their craft if they outsource the fundamentals to AI in their formative years?

The new generation of “vibe coders” doesn’t really code; they collaborate with the machines that do. The trend is spreading quickly through Silicon Valley, where more than a quarter of Y Combinator startups now generate roughly 95% of their code with AI. These “developers” describe what they want, press Enter, and voilà, a polished script appears. It feels like magic until it doesn’t. When the code fails or the model hallucinates, few know how to fix it. The grind that once built intuition has been replaced by orchestration, with a generation managing creation rather than mastering it.

This isn’t confined to engineering. We see it taking hold in finance, PR, academia, medicine and the law. 

AI makes us productive, yes, breathtakingly so. But productivity is a tricky drug. It rewards immediacy over understanding. It convinces us that speed is mastery, that iteration equals insight. 

The real danger isn’t that AI will outthink us. It’s that we’ll forget how to think without it. Human craft is the gateway to judgment. But strip away the fundamentals and the next generation of professionals may end up fluent in prompting but illiterate in reasoning, attempting to oversee intelligence they no longer possess.

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AI will only deliver value when leaders develop the new competencies needed to transform their firms and teams so that they can make full use of the technology’s potential to provide real strategic advantage.

Case study: How Cisco uses AI agents and nudges to cut bureaucracy and free employees’ time

“If you can give 5% of their time back to a more than 86,000-person enterprise, what they can do with that time to drive better outcomes for our customers is exponential.” 

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Evidence of workplace productivity gains from Gen AI are emerging, but he says the larger truth is that we still know very little about AI, the job market, and future use cases, and that goes for the biggest AI companies, too.

And one more thing…

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