The tradeoff between human and AI context

Summary

AI coding is a skill. You have to decide how much context to put in your brain vs the AI. You can waste your time thinking about the wrong problem because you failed to delegate. Or you can give yourself a headache when the AI coder doesn’t get it. I think about it in terms of spectrum of human to AI context. At the highest levels, we, humans, own all the context. We operate here when our specific value-add matters. We also work here in the many cases AI coders aren’t that smart yet. At the lowest level we decide context is not worthy of our attention, we let the AI take over. Let’s walk through the layers from most human to least human in the loop. Most removed layer – ChatGPT dialog (foundational education, high-level reflection, like talking to a colleague at another company) Here you formulate a “Stackoverflow question” to ChatGPT and pas. You’re engaging in socratic dialog trying to take apart a problem. This layer is useful because asking good questions is a skill and requires YOU to reformulate the required context into a succinct answer. This layer is like talking to a colleague at a different company about your problem. From them, you would get a less-biased perspective. Indeed perspective is the key value here. It’s often like therapy — laying out problems from first principles, stating your assumptions explicitly, and thinking step-by-step how to explain a problem helps solve the problem itself. Claude Code / Codex ask knowledge questions (ask questions about your code, like talking to a colleague at your company) At this next layer deeper, we assume the project is in context. We ask questions – “in our project, see over here we’re repeating the HTML header, in golang / fiber, how do we use a shared layout?”. This layer is like talking to a trusted colleague, they can give you direct answers that take into account the project’s context. You might get a quick answer, but you may not get a deep, foundational rethinking of things which we sometimes need. The...