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It's not about implementing a graph or a trie. It's about knowing when and why these data structures matter.

Sure, you (or an LLM) can probably find a package that can quickly search for a file in an extremely large filesystem.

I'm guessing that the authors of S3 didn't have that luxury when they were building out this service years ago, though. There are very few people on Earth that deal with exabytes of data, and prior art only gets you so far in this scenario.

The only way something like that can be built is by truly understanding CS fundamentals. Most people study CS to become a SWE. If programming gets reduced to maintaining prompts and optimizing here and there, then there is a real risk of this discipline eroding over time.




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