**A Note on Computer Systems Concepts and the Role of AI**

The slogan of this course, throughout, is:  
      **"It's concepts, not code!"**  
This does not mean that a Computer Systems course should not stress code.
Indeed, it should stress code heavily!  But only as a way for the student
to prove, by his or her own code, that he or she has achieved mastery over
the corresponding concept.  Anything more in the code is simply overkill.
Therefore, I often jokingly describe the goals of this course is the
highest number of concepts _per hundred lines of code_.

In the future, AI will push us further in this direction of concepts.
The AI can easily and rapidly write large amounts of locally correct
code that compiles and executes.  The trap is that the resulting
execution may not work.  This is because the AI agent has no understanding
of concepts.

So, it is the job of the human developer to continually explain to the
AI the pertinent concepts, and where to apply them.  The result is a
high-level conversation between the human developer and the AI agent.
It's up to the developer to teach the relevant _concepts_ to the AI agent.
("It's concepts, not code!")  The student who has not mastered the
concepts, first, will find it difficult to productively _steer_ the
higher-level AI agent, which will result in non-optimal code.

There is an analogy here with how compilers enabled humans to converse
with the computer through high-level source code, while the compilers
took over much of the human job of writing the assembly code.  Of course,
predictions are always dangerous *(and especially about the future)*,
But I'll risk predicting the obvious: In the future, software developers
will converse with AI coding agents in English and through human concepts,
while the AI agent will take over much of the human job of writing the
high-level codebase.  Just as the use of compilers introduced a new way
of talking to the computer, through source code, AI agents will introduce
an even newer way of talking to the computer, through English.

Sinking to a brief reflection on philosophy, I am brought back to a
quote of Alexander Pope:  
> **"The proper study of mankind is man."**

This course attempts to teach a small set of underlying systems concepts,
from which implementation is a mere, if tedious, exercise.  Mastery of
the concepts will be shown by just a relatively few lines of code,
that demonstrate mastery through a simple proof of concept.

To summarize:
**"It's concepts, not code!"**.
If this appeals to you, then this course has been written for you.

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NOTE:
While it should be obvious from reading these Review Notes, here is
a standard disclaimer.

The review notes in this directory are based entirely on my own oral
lectures in class.  After class, I created a rough outline of my lecture,
and then used an AI to generate review notes.  I would then review,
modify, and polish the review notes generated by the AI.  The creative
portion is my own, and the very nice textual presentation is largely
the work of the AI.  For the AI, I have mostly been using Claude Opus
4.5 with these review notes.