The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer

Jan 5, 2025

A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis

Last week, I watched our AI choke on a React codebase - again. As timeout errors flooded my terminal, something clicked. We’d been teaching AI to read code like a fresh bootcamp grad, not a senior developer.

Here’s what I mean.
The Bootcamp vs Senior Mindset

Remember your first day reading production code? Without any experience with handling mature codebases, you probably quickly get lost in the details[0]

But watch a senior dev review a massive PR:

They jump straight to the core files
Group changes by feature (“all auth changes, all db changes”)
Build a mental model of architecture first
Only then dive into implementation