Muhammad Ayan Malik

Paid someone to do a code review last week, first actual engineer to ever see what I'd built. Watched her scroll for a solid two minutes without saying anything. Then: "okay, so, this works, but why does this file talk to three different places to do one thing?"

I didn't have an answer. I'd asked the AI for a feature, it worked, I moved on, asked for the next feature, it worked, moved on again. Never once looked at whether feature three quietly duplicated logic from feature one. The app functioned perfectly the whole time. It just also had, apparently, three slightly different versions of the same idea living in different corners of the codebase.

What got me wasn't that it was bad, she was actually kind about it, said this is completely normal for anything built fast. What got me was realizing I'd been measuring progress purely by "does it work when I click it," and that measurement had been quietly lying to me the entire time.

I don't think the answer is doing it slower from scratch. I think it's that at some point, someone who actually reads code needs to look at the whole thing, not feature by feature.