On Building with AI

The narrative around AI coding tools tends to go one of two ways: either they’re about to replace engineers entirely, or they’re a glorified autocomplete that adds more noise than signal.

Neither is right.

What’s actually happening is more interesting and more mundane. The unit of work is changing. Tasks that used to take an afternoon - scaffolding a new service, writing a migration, adding a test suite - now take minutes. That’s not nothing. It compounds.

But the judgment calls don’t get easier. Which abstraction to reach for, when to fight the framework, how to structure something so it stays maintainable - those still require the same thinking they always did. Maybe more, because you’re making them faster and more often.

The useful mental model I’ve landed on: AI handles the translation work. You still have to know where you’re going.