An Engineer's 'Brain Sandwich' Keeps AI From Eating Your Skills
The Brain Sandwich
Emily, one of the team's strongest engineers, has a simple framework for working with AI without letting your engineering skills atrophy: use your brain first to understand the problem, then hand the build fully to AI, then bring your brain back to review the diff and make the work explainable. If you can't say what's changing and why, it isn't ready for review.
Before you tell the agent to start building anything, you go there and read and understand it first. You don't need a complete implementation plan, but you need a rough idea of where you're going.
- coldtea
The whole actual, not just the "openly admitted", utility of AI is to allow people to ship while not understanding the work, and not even caring that much about it.
So such posts will make as much change as "trade, but be ethical" would make on a late 80s Wall Street trading floor:
"Before you tell the agent to start building anything, you go there and read and understand it first."
Yeah, not gonna happen. 1 in 100 might do that.
- fluxusars
I fully agree with the approach, but sadly that doesn't make the overwhelming amount of code reviews in the AI age much better. At best, it might slow down your colleagues' deluge of review requests a little. But also, you still have to spend time reviewing your own LLM code, of which there is more of and you're naturally less familiar with than if you'd hand-written it, so it takes longer to review.
- pazimzadeh
sounds like 'design' is back
- passive
The basic concept here, that you take personal responsibility for the input and output being transmitted to/from the LLM, is an obvious but critical one, so I appreciate this terminology as a way to convey it.
I'll try using Brain Sandwich as guidance for less technical folk.
- kpmcc
Like the concept.
Pedantic addendum: this is an AI sandwich, not a brain sandwich.