Programming has always been about managing complexity—finding ways to express our intentions to computers while maintaining human readability and understanding. Today, we face a new paradigm: generating code using large language models (LLMs). But is this solving the software development challenge, or are we adding another layer of indirection?

As I wrote in my post on the state of AI-based software development, AI still has many limitations when applied to software development. However, I found one case in which it improved my productivity tenfold without any meaningful downsides. It's learning a new code base. It's