Working with AI Means Thinking More, Not Less
Working with AI Means Thinking More, Not Less Yes, this text is long. Yes, it repeats itself in places. I did not clean that up. A text that sounded too smooth while arguing that AI forces you to think more, not less, would be at least slightly dishonest. This is not fast food for quick consumption. And yes, don’t worry: you won’t hear anything especially new here. That is part of the problem too. There is a popular and very seductive story about AI in software development. Now that the machine can write code, the human gets to think less. You just point it in the right direction, and the model will quickly and cheaply do a significant part of the work on its own. In that picture, AI is primarily an accelerator for code production, and human thinking gradually shifts from necessity to optional extra. I keep feeling more and more strongly that this description is dangerously wrong. A more accurate formula for my own experience right now is this: I’m the tech lead, the AI is the entire team in one body . And if you take that metaphor seriously, the conclusion is the exact opposite of the mainstream narrative. Working with AI is not a way to think less. It is a mode in which you need to think more, not less . Not because the AI is bad. But because it is too good at one very treacherous thing: it confidently and smoothly fills in what was left unsaid. I’m the tech lead, the AI is the team At first this metaphor felt like a neat formulation. Now it feels like a literal description of what is going on. If you treat AI as a very fast and very capable executor, a lot of things become clearer immediately. It really can wipe out months of routine work. It can spin up prototypes quickly, take over test scaffolding, try out alternatives, make local edits, help break a task into parts, and sometimes even suggest a decent direction. On the surface, this really does look like a silver bullet. Especially if the human knows the stack and can read code. The pace becomes so extreme th