AI Systems: Building Tools That Understand Code, Not Just Generate It
Most AI coding tools are generation engines. You describe what you want, they produce code. This works for isolated functions, boilerplate, and anything where the context fits in a prompt. It breaks down when the problem is understanding an existing system — navigating a codebase you didn’t write, debugging a failure with no obvious error message, figuring out why something that worked in isolation fails in the larger system. These are comprehension problems, not generation problems. And comprehension requires structure, not just pattern matching. ...