No. You can be a very productive developer and have the syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and the same in reverse.
I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes, etc. white struggling massively with system design. And vice versa. People have different talents.
But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success of the developer who's better at orchestration, architecture, and system design than the developer who's very good at tiny micro-system type of work. Yes, there is still a need for someone who can read and understand regexes... but is there anywhere near as much of a need as before? Not at all.
Now. there are very many dual threats, and most truly senior engineers are both. These people now have an even bigger leg up, because they have an understanding of system mechanics + the superpower of Claude Code/etc. They don't have to waste as much time on boilerplate and raw implementation, and yet they can check the output of their input to the AI. They are also probably better equipped to build testing harnesses, etc., that adapt well to agentic use.
I find it highly suspect that someone can be a productive developer and find syntax to be a blocker. I've worked professionally in software for 20 years and I've yet to come across a developer I thought was good but kept forgetting what curly braces mean. It's like saying "he's a great writer, but he's illiterate."
I have, incidentally, held the title of "Principal Software Architect", designing distributed systems with kubernetes, and I will say this about architects: if they aren't immersed in the day to day code, they suck at their job. If you're too removed from the constraints you can't be effective at that job. I have however worked with "architects" that refused to get their hands dirty, and it was always miserable.
OK, I think "syntax" might mean different things to different people.
I'll give you an example: at one time I essentially re-implemented the behavior of a WeakMap in JS because I didn't know that the language feature existed. AI is much better at implicitly "knowing" these things because it can model the entire language and possible token-space much better than humans can. That is something I always struggled with; my long-term memory is not great.
I think that's very different from remembering how to write a basic function.
