I think one of the things that makes me good at development work is the amount of context I can hold in my head at once. Generally, I can maintain mental mapping for a lot of state at once. That helps me better understand and visualize complex systems, and consider aspects of how they interact.
At the moment, this is also a valuable asset for AI-assisted development. Even the best models just cannot hold the context I can manage in my head. So after I get working code, I go through and validate all the context correctness across the new code. I remind AI to use constants we’ve already defined, refactor shared logic to internal packages, handle business logic appropriately, and account for the many many edge cases I know we have that AI doesn’t know or understand.
It’s never going to one-shot complex functionality that requires a lot of context. That’s where I come in.
I expect that will change as models and context management strategies continue to evolve. But at the moment, I’m sitting with the knowledge of all the work I still have to do after the AI is “done” before something is ready to ship.