Chapter 4
Feeding the Machine
When a senior engineer inherits an unfamiliar codebase, they do not begin by writing code. They read. They trace execution paths, identify the entry points, follow the data through the system, and build a mental model of what exists before attempting to change it. The best engineers are often the ones who spend the longest in this reading phase, because they have learned, usually through expensive mistakes, that the cost of understanding is always lower than the cost of misunderstanding. Acting before understanding feels productive. Correcting the consequences of acting without understanding is what actually consumes the budget. This practice predates AI by decades. It maps onto the problem of constructing useful ...
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