AI Made Coding Fast. Thinking Is Still Hard.

Something I did not expect from building with AI.

Everyone is showing what AI can build in an afternoon. A clone of this,
a copy of that. That is real. It works.

But there is an asymmetry nobody puts in the demo.

AI is extraordinary at building things that already exist. Ask it for a
copy of a product you know, and you are most of the way there in a day.
Not because the code is easy, but because every decision inside that
product was already made a million times over. The structure, the
screens, the flow. It has seen all of them.

Ask it for something nobody has built, and the floor disappears. There
is no reference answer. You need a number, deep in the system, that
quietly decides how the whole thing behaves. The AI will give you one
instantly. It will look completely reasonable. That is the problem, not
the solution.

Two things from my own logs.

I had a threshold that felt obviously right. I implemented it and
measured it across 25 conditions. It changed nothing in 20 of them, and
it made the system worse in 5. I deleted it.

Of 48 defects I have found so far, 16 were not in the code at all. They
were in my own specification. The code did exactly what it was told.
What it was told was wrong.

AI collapsed the cost of writing code. It did not touch the cost of
knowing what is correct. When you copy something, almost all of the cost
is the first one. When you build something new, almost all of it is the
second, and that part is still just you, measuring, and being willing to
throw away the answer you liked.

Copying got much faster. Thinking did not.

#ArtificialIntelligence #SoftwareEngineering #AIThoughtLeadership