Varun Jharkhandi

I spent yesterday debugging a payment flow that an AI assistant confidently generated for me. The happy path? Flawless. The part where a user's card declines mid-transaction and we need to retry with exponential backoff while logging to three different services? The assistant completely missed it and didn't even flag that it was skipping anything.

It got me thinking about where these tools actually excel versus where they consistently fall short. They're genuinely exceptional at scaffolding, at spinning up the obvious structure of a feature. But the moment you need to handle what shouldn't happen race conditions, partial failures, the weird state your system ends up in at 2 AM they seem to lose the plot entirely.