Deliver faster, at the expense of understanding?

Every line of code you don't understand is a loan you'll eventually repay, with interest.

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How fast you can ship? LinkedIn is full of it. “Built and deployed an app in 4 hours.” “Created 3 MVPs this week.” “My AI agent wrote 20,000 lines of code while I slept.”

Cool. But do you understand any of it?

I’m not here to be the grumpy old guy yelling at clouds. AI-assisted development is genuinely useful, and I also use it daily. But I’ve noticed something troubling in the discourse: we’ve started treating understanding as optional. As overhead. As something that slows you down.

That’s backwards. Understanding doesn’t slow you down, it’s the reason you’re fast in the first place.

Speed

Something I’ve observed across every hig…