> AI can create the illusion that you understand a system because it can make the system work for you. You ask a question and get an answer. You encounter an error and get a patch. The patch doesn't work, so you provide the new error and get another patch. Eventually the machine finds something that works.

> From the outside, this looks like competence. But if you don't understand why the solution works, you're not actually becoming more capable. You're becoming dependent on the machine to maintain the illusion.

So many things in life operate exactly like this: We don’t need to understand the why, we just accept the solution as-is and move on. An experienced professional has another skill: keeping track of which things matter enough to dig in to and develop mastery, and which things can be “good enough”. This is also informed by the “intuition of how machines behave” that the author mentions.