# on AI

As a developer, I think AI is genuinely good for us. This job has always meant moving with the tools. If nobody had, we'd all still be patching COBOL on a mainframe somewhere and calling it a career.

I learned to build the long way first, writing everything by hand. That order mattered. The concepts were already clear by the time I started leaning on AI, so I can tell when it's right and when it's confidently wrong. And anything that's new, interesting, or just plain confusing (the stuff I'd hate to only half understand) I still write by hand first, because that's how it actually sticks.

What I care about most is that less is more. AI will happily give you more than you asked for: an extra abstraction, an extra file, a hundred lines that look fine and do nothing. The skill now is knowing what it's doing, what to keep, and what to cut.