AI is no longer a novelty in development.
It’s not a toy.
It’s not magic.
It’s not replacing engineers tomorrow.
But it is changing how we work i...
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This reinforces the idea that critical thinking is the real competitive advantage now. Tools are accessible to everyone.
This has been precisely my experience so far. I think the required skill set is evolving.
Your experience mirrors mine with test generation. It handles the obvious paths well but misses business nuance.
Great article. To me, AI is just a multiplier. I could get AI to re-write all my code comments in French, but I don't speak French so would have no way to verify correctness.
People need to stop asking AI to do stuff and start telling it to do stuff.
It's not magic; it's statistics. AI didn't miss the edge-cases. Most devs miss the edge-cases and that pollutes the dataset, so statistically it did the very-ill-defined task correctly.
Now it's time for your French speaking ass to verify, cos when you asked it to write your tests, YOU missed the edge-cases. If you had told it which edge-cases to test, it would have.
We're playing around with a reasoning engine, not an artificial intelligence. The sooner engineers get back to engineering the better.
The "confidently wrong code" section is the most important part of this post. I've been using AI for code generation daily and that pattern — plausible-looking code with subtle issues — is the real danger zone.
The async error handling thing especially. I've caught AI-generated try/catch blocks that swallowed errors silently more times than I can count. It produces code that passes linting, passes basic tests, and fails quietly in production.
My rule now: treat AI output like a pull request from a smart but junior dev. Review everything. Trust nothing implicitly.
What I would like to see in this article is what was the .ai architecture used in order for AI to perform the way it is described in the article.
It took me a month to inform the AI that I used the specific architecture on code, front-end, back-end, and methodologies. So far, I'm working on about seven different .md files that describe how I want it to perform.
Having said that, it means I pay more tokens, but it is obliged to follow a set of rules. This makes it good, and I would rather say better in most respects because it has architectural guidance from me. So I can observe it messing a bit less than when I started without those .md files and rules
Really appreciate this breakdown — especially the part about AI amplifying senior judgment rather than replacing it. That's exactly what I've been noticing too.
I'm building a font tool FontPreview.online and started using AI for the repetitive parts: generating font card components, writing similar test cases, even drafting API validation schemas. Like you said — it handles the mechanical stuff well, but the judgment still has to come from me.
The "confidently wrong" part hit home. I had AI generate a font filtering function that looked perfect but completely ignored Unicode range support. Everything compiled, tests passed, but it would've broken for users with non-Latin scripts. That's the kind of subtle mistake that only gets caught if you actually understand the domain.
"AI writes drafts. I own decisions."
That line is going on a sticky note above my monitor.
Curious — how do you handle the "architectural drift" problem you mentioned? I've started adding architecture.md files and referencing them in prompts, but still end up correcting a lot. Would love to hear what's working for you.
I agree that blind trust is dangerous. The review process has to be intentional or technical debt will accumulate silently.
This makes me think that AI is not replacing developers but reshaping what being a good developer means.
I appreciate the honesty about tradeoffs. Faster does not automatically mean better.
I fully agree that critical thinking is the edge these days, and you can only think critically if you understand the fundamentals properly. Nice experiment!
Thanks for sharing your actual experience.
It was delicious time with your story.