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When I was eight years old, I watched a mountaineering documentary while waiting for the cricket match to start. I remember being incredibly frustrated watching these climbers inch their way up a massive rock face, stopping every few feet to hammer what looked like giant nails into the mountain.
“Why don’t they just climb faster?” I asked my father. “They’re wasting so much time with those metal things!”
“Those are safety anchors, son. If they fall, they don’t want to tumble all the way back to the bottom.”
I found this logic deeply unsatisfying. Clearly, the solution was simple: don’t fall. Just climb faster and more carefully.
Thirty years later, debugging AI-generated code at 2 AM in my Chennai office, I finally understood what those mountaineers were doing.
The Intoxicating Rush of AI-Powered Flow
Last month, I was working on a revenue analysis project for my manager—the kind of perfectionist who notices when PowerPoint slides have inconsistent font sizes. The task seemed straightforward: slice and dice our quarterly revenue across multiple dimensions. Normally, this would have been a three-day slog of SQL queries, CSV exports, and fighting with chart libraries.
But this time, I had my AI assistant. And it was like having a data visualization superhero as my personal coding buddy.
”Create a stacked bar chart showing quarterly revenue by contract type,” I typed. Thirty seconds later: a beautiful, publication-quality chart.
I was in what psychologists call “flow state,” supercharged by AI assistance. Chart after chart materialized on my screen. For three glorious hours, I was completely absorbed. I generated seventeen different visualizations, created an interactive dashboard, and even added animated transitions that made the data dance.
I was so caught up in the momentum that the thought of stopping to commit changes never even crossed my mind. Why interrupt this beautiful flow?
That should have been my first clue that I was about to learn a very expensive lesson about the value of safety anchors.
When the Mountain Crumbles
At 1:47 AM, disaster struck. I asked my AI assistant to ”optimize the color palette for color-blind accessibility” across all my charts. It was a reasonable request—the kind of thoughtful enhancement that makes software better.
What happened next was like watching a controlled demolition, except there was nothing controlled about it.
The AI didn’t just change colors. It restructured my entire charting library. It modified the data processing pipeline. It altered the component architecture. It even changed the CSS framework ”for better accessibility compliance.”
Suddenly, my beautiful dashboard looked like it had been designed by someone having a heated argument with their computer. Charts overlapped, data disappeared, and the color scheme now resembled a medical diagram of various internal organs.
”No problem,” I thought. ”I’ll just ask it to undo those changes.”
This is where I learned that AI assistants, despite their impressive capabilities, have the rollback skills of a three-year-old trying to unscramble an egg.
I spent the next two hours in what can only be described as a negotiation with a well-meaning but entirely confused digital assistant. By 4 AM, I had given up and reverted to the last committed version of my code—from six hours earlier. Three hours of brilliant AI-generated visualizations vanished into the digital equivalent of that mountainside I would have tumbled down as an impatient eight-year-old.
The Wisdom of Slow Climbing
The next morning, over coffee and the particular kind of wisdom that comes from watching your colleague’s spectacular failure, my teammate Mohan delivered his verdict.
”You know what you did wrong?” he said. ”You forgot to use pitons.”
”Pitons?”
”Like mountain climbers. They hammer those metal spikes into the rock every few feet and attach their safety rope. If they fall, they only drop back to the last piton, not all the way to the bottom.”
”Your pitons are your commits, your tests, your version control. Every time you get a working feature, you hammer in a piton. Test it, commit it, make sure you can get back to that exact spot if something goes wrong.”
”But the AI was so fast,” I protested. ”Stopping to commit felt like it would break my flow.”
”Flow is great until you flow right off a cliff,” Mohan replied. ”The AI doesn’t understand your safety rope. It just keeps climbing higher and higher, making bigger and bigger changes. You’re the one who has to decide when to stop and secure your position.”
As much as I hated to admit it, Mohan was right. I had been so mesmerized by the AI’s speed that I had abandoned every good software engineering practice I knew. No incremental commits, no systematic testing, no architectural planning—just pure, reckless velocity.
The Art of Strategic Impatience
But this isn’t just about my late-night coding disaster. This challenge is baked into how AI assistants work.
AI assistants are incredibly good at making us feel productive. They generate code so quickly and confidently that it’s easy to mistake output for outcomes. But productivity without sustainability is just a fancy way of creating technical debt.
This isn’t an argument against AI-assisted development—it’s an argument for getting better at it. The mountaineers in that documentary weren’t slow because they were incompetent; they were methodical because they understood the consequences of failure.
The AI doesn’t care about your codebase either. It doesn’t understand your architecture, your business constraints, or your technical debt. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s not a substitute for engineering judgment. And engineering judgment, it turns out, is largely about knowing when to slow down.
Which brings us back to those mountaineers and their methodical approach. In my revenue dashboard disaster, I was going incredibly fast, but I ended up arriving at the same place I started, six hours later and significantly more exhausted. The irony is that if I had spent 15 minutes every hour committing working code and running tests, I would have finished the project faster, not slower.
My experience isn’t unique. Across the industry, developers are discovering that AI-powered productivity comes with hidden costs.
The Future Is Methodical
We’re living through the most significant shift in software development productivity since the invention of high-level programming languages. AI assistants are genuinely transformative tools that can accelerate development in ways that seemed impossible just a few years ago.
But they don’t eliminate the need for good engineering practices; they make those practices more important. The faster you can generate code, the more crucial it becomes to have reliable ways of validating, testing, and versioning that code. This might disappoint the eight-year-old in all of us who just wants to climb faster. But it should encourage the part of us that wants to actually reach the summit. Building software with AI assistance is a high-risk activity. You’re generating code faster than you can fully understand it, integrating libraries you didn’t choose, and implementing patterns you might not have had time to fully vet.
In that environment, safety anchors aren’t overhead—they’re essential infrastructure. The future of AI-assisted development isn’t about eliminating the methodical practices that make software engineering work. It’s about getting better at them, because we’re going to need them more than ever.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some commits to catch up on. And this time, I’m setting a timer.
