This was Peter Naur’s observation in his 1985 paper Programming as Theory Building. One of the best papers I’ve ever read. Programming IS mostly building castles in the air of your head, not the code on the screen.

If you do the thinking and let the LLM do the typing it works incredibly well. I can write code 10x faster with AI, but I’m maintaining the mental model in my head, the “theory” as Naur calls it. But if you try to outsource the theory to the LLM (build me an app that does X) you’re bound to fail in horrible ways. That’s why Claude Code is amazing but Replit can only do basic toy apps.