In the pre-AI days, when you built a thing, your mental model of the thing developed alongside the act of building. I mostly built mobile and webapps in a fullstack capacity and I had a deep sense of how those things actually worked under the hood. If someone flagged a bug in those products or had a question on how they worked, I could easily figure out the next moves, because I had this very clear mental model. With AI, that has completely flipped. I’ve built a good number of things now using AI and I feel my role is more like that of an EM instructing their team of engineers to go build something. So the same way my EM at work doesn’t have a deep mental model of everything I build, I don’t have a deep mental model of the products I’ve used AI to build on my behalf. There’s a clear tradeoff here - when I wrote the code myself things moved slower but I had a strong sense of what was built and understood it deeply. When I build using AI, I can create things much faster - even things which I didn’t really know were possible - but my mental model of those things feels very flimsy. If bugs are found in these products, I am entirely reliant on the AI to fix them. I haven’t really found a clear balance here and would love to hear others’ feelings on this and how they’ve tackled it. Going back to fully hand-written code feels extremely impractical and a surefire way to be out of a job (given every company’s strong push to become “AI native”). At the same time, going all in on AI only compounds this feeling of building without learning and without really understanding what you’re building. The answer I come back to is one where you leverage AI for writing the code but taking a very disciplined approach to studying its outputs and staying firmly in the driver’s seat for all the key decisions, but I’ve found this pretty hard to implement in practice given how quickly everyone expects things to be delivered now - i.e. the same way QA/testing/etc. was the first things to get cut on fast development timelines, it’s far too easy to cut out the steps required for the human to build context of what the AI has built in our AI-driven development world. Not the best framed question and I apologize for the rant but would love to hear others’ thoughts. submitted by /u/thambroni
Originally posted by u/thambroni on r/ClaudeCode