The old model was simple. Get exposed to something, take time to understand it, learn the fundamentals, then build.
That still works for a lot of things, but not when AI is writing most of the code. The whole story flipped. You don’t need to understand something fully before you build with it anymore. Just build it, see how it compares against the existing system, see what goes wrong. The failures show you how each piece actually works. You get a map of the system through its fractures.
Build first. Learn from what breaks.
And not just the code. When something breaks you don’t just learn why that function failed. You learn what the product was supposed to do, what the user expected, where the assumption was wrong. Every failure is a window into the system and the thing the system serves.
But building first only gives you the surface. You see the shape of it, not the depth, and you can’t stop there. You take what you skimmed and drill in, layer by layer, with AI running in parallel. One niche at a time. Pick a specific corner and go to the root. AI lets you do that now without waiting for a teacher or a course or a mentor. You just go.
Remove the friction, build as fast as you can, then learn, then build again. Compress that cycle and keep repeating it until you’re comfortable within one specific niche, then pick the next one. Each rotation teaches you the code less and the product more.
This matters because when AI writes the code, you own it. Every decision it made, every tradeoff it picked, every shortcut it took. If you just wave things through without understanding why, eventually something will break and you’ll be staring at a system you can’t reason about. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s Tuesday.
The moment you stop understanding, you stop owning it. Not just the code, but the product, the business logic, the thing users actually touch.
We will lose context of our own codebases. AI will have written most of it, and the repositories will outgrow what any one person can hold in their head.
There’s nothing we can do about that.
The code is temporary. What you understand about the product is not.
The code context fades. The product understanding compounds. What it does, what it doesn’t, where it falls apart, what users actually need. That stays with you. That’s the thing AI can’t take.