> But if you are trying to understand something well, there is no better tool for helping you than AI
Could not disagree more.
The best way to understand something deeply is to practice it. AI is anti-practice. It's like trying to learn something by following a YouTube video step by step. It has an outcome and it feels productive but it's not going to stick in your head at all. It's not practice
you can use AI to get a faster explanation for what's happening in a big codebase, it makes the timelines on developing features much lower from my experience
am I losing out on something by not having to spend hours clicking through redundant parts of a large codebase to get a concrete answer on something? doesn't feel like it
I would say a better analogy is using Google… you can use it as a tool to seek information and deepen your understanding. But it requires your brain to be engaged and to be putting that stream of knowledge into practice.