> AI doesn’t help me with these. At least not much. Mostly because the time I spend coding is time I spend understanding, diagnosing, and perfecting. Not the code. The product.

It can actually help a lot here too.

In fact I rarely have AI author or edit code, but I have it all time researching, finding edge cases I didn't think about, digging into dependencies code, finding ideas or alternative approaches. My usage is 90% of the time assisting with information gathering, criticizing (I have multiple reviewer skills with different personas, and I have multiple LLMs run them), refining, reviewing.

Even when it comes to product stuff, many of my clients have complicated business logic. Talking multi-tenant-company warehouse software where each process is drastically different and complexity balloons fast even for a single one of them. It helps to connect the dots between different sources of information (old Jira task, discord dumps, confluence, codebase, etc).

And it can iteratively test and find edge cases in applications too, same as you would do manually by taking control of the browser and testing the most uncommon paths.

I would do much less without this assistance.

I really don't get why people focus so much on the least empowering part (code), where it actually tends to balloon complexity quick or overwhelm you with so much content and edits that you can't have the energy to follow while maintaining quality.

Yeah I’ve used it for that and it use useful. But it’s kind of like listening to a math audiobook vs working out math problems. I still need to work out the math problems to really understand what’s going on.

I’m also nervous about the inevitable cognitive decline of relying on AI to explain everything to me.