I was building an iOS app.
I’m an infrastructure engineer. Mobile applications weren’t what I’d spent my career building. With AI, I built a functioning financial management app for iOS. That was a much bigger change for me than writing a familiar script faster.
I could work on the problem and learn the unfamiliar technology at the same time. I didn’t suddenly become an experienced mobile developer. There were still things I didn’t know, and I had to work out how to check them.
Some problems looked familiar anyway.
In my monitoring work, a healthy score hid systems the check couldn’t reach. In the cemetery application, a successful web response hid emails that hadn’t been sent. The code was different, but both gave me a reassuring answer without showing that the job had happened.
That’s where the years in IT helped. When something said it worked, I wanted to see what it had actually done. I could ask that question in a new kind of application even while I was learning how the application worked.
My experience didn’t catch everything.
My own tests passed while production still had bugs. I found them by looking at production telemetry after deployment. Experience helped me question the result, but I still needed the logs and the actual behavior to find the problem.
AI helps me research, write code, and work through a design. I have to understand what we’re trying to accomplish and whether what we built makes sense. When I don’t know enough to answer that, I need to keep investigating or get help.
I also learned I could build too much.
For assistant memory, I built a database, a model router, a chat interface, an MCP connection, and a mobile front end. It worked. Then I moved the useful context into plain markdown files and stopped using the larger system.
I’d spent time building the parts I knew how to build. The harder part was deciding what was worth remembering and writing it so it would still make sense months later. I think that’s an easy mistake to make when AI makes building so much easier. I can do more now, but I still need to ask whether more is helping.