Who Checks the Foundation?

AI lets anyone frame a house now.

With the right tools, I can scaffold a full-stack application faster than I ever could alone. Type-safe. Styled. Shippable. A virtual dev team at my fingertips.

But lately I’ve been asking a different set of questions—ones that don’t show up in the output logs.

Power Tools Don’t Teach Craft

This is the shift: AI-assisted coding feels less like writing software and more like assembling prefabricated parts with a very smart assistant.

The upside is obvious.
The danger is subtle.

Because now, the person wielding the tool doesn’t always know what they’re building on.

• They don’t see the corner cases until it’s too late.
• They don’t notice brittle abstractions until something cracks.
• They move fast—but they’re not always watching the load-bearing walls.

And so I keep coming back to this question:

Who checks the foundation when anyone can frame a house?

The Apprentice, the Builder, and the Architect

In traditional trades, you start as an apprentice. You sweep sawdust. You measure twice. You learn through mistakes—yours and others’.

Eventually, you become a builder. You trust your hand. You can spot weak wood or off-center beams without a ruler.

And if you stick with it long enough, you might become an architect. Not just drawing plans—but designing for edge cases. For wind. For time.

Software was never this cleanly structured—but experience used to act like gravity. Hard-won judgment accumulated over years of real-world tension: scaling systems, debugging prod failures, surviving legacy code.

Now AI gives everyone the tools of the master.
But not the instincts.

What Gets Lost When Speed Replaces Struggle?

I’m not nostalgic for pain. I don’t think everyone needs to suffer through five broken deployments to learn how to write a good migration script.

But we do need to ask:

How do you develop architectural intuition when the tool smooths over every bump?

What’s the modern equivalent of an apprenticeship in an AI-native world?

• Who teaches discernment when the code always compiles?
• Who slows you down long enough to ask: “Is this pattern going to rot?”
• Who shows you how to see what’s missing, not just what works?

I don’t have clean answers yet. But I do know this:
We can’t just train prompt engineers.
We need to cultivate systems thinkers.

People who can feel tension in the frame—
even when the AI says it’s done.