2025-09-08 Ibrahim Diallo
Whether the AI generates perfect code or complete hallucinations, you still have to read it. You still have to trace through what it’s supposed to do, how it interacts with the rest of the system, and what the side effects are. The longer the generated code, the longer it takes to build your mental model.
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This is why the real bottleneck in software development isn’t writing, it’s understanding.
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until we solve the “understanding” problem, the cost of software development remains the same: the time it takes for someone to make sense of it all.
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Instead of asking AI to generate large blocks of code, we might be better off asking it to help us understand existing code. Instead of measuring productivity by lines of code written, we should measure it by how quickly teams can build accurate mental models of their systems.
https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-hard