The Missing Curriculum: Essential Concepts For Data Scientists in the Age of AI Coding Agents

With the rise of AI coding agents, a developer's primary role shifts from writing code to reviewing it, making software engineering principles more critical than ever. The content emphasizes mastering concepts like code smells, abstraction, and design patterns to effectively guide AI tools and produce production-grade code. It specifically analyzes the "Divergent Change" code smell, where a single class takes on too many responsibilities, using an ML pipeline example to illustrate the problem. The solution involves refactoring the code to separate concerns, such as data loading, cleaning, and model training, into distinct classes, which improves testability, flexibility, and maintainability.