Does AI Understand Your Codebase?
Originally published on Impl — Jaroslaw Michalik's newsletter on engineering, AI, and building software that lasts.
An AI tool that has indexed your repository can retrieve any file in milliseconds, which feels like understanding but isn't. Indexing is search; understanding is knowing why the pieces are shaped the way they are. The workflow that actually works is asking the model to produce diagrams and architecture maps of a codebase first, and only then letting it start changing code — not assuming comprehension it hasn't demonstrated.