The creative vs toil split resonates, but I think there's a third category everyone misses: the connective tissue. The glue code, the error handling, the edge cases that aren't creative but teach you how things actually break.
I run 17 products as an indie maker. AI absolutely helps me ship faster — I can prototype in hours what used to take days. But the understanding gap is real. I've caught myself debugging AI-generated code where I didn't fully grok the failure mode because I didn't write the happy path.
My compromise: I let AI handle the first pass on boilerplate, but I manually write anything that touches money, auth, or data integrity. Those are the places where understanding isn't optional.
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The creative vs toil split resonates, but I think there's a third category everyone misses: the connective tissue. The glue code, the error handling, the edge cases that aren't creative but teach you how things actually break.
I run 17 products as an indie maker. AI absolutely helps me ship faster — I can prototype in hours what used to take days. But the understanding gap is real. I've caught myself debugging AI-generated code where I didn't fully grok the failure mode because I didn't write the happy path.
My compromise: I let AI handle the first pass on boilerplate, but I manually write anything that touches money, auth, or data integrity. Those are the places where understanding isn't optional.