Understanding Software Beyond Syntax and Compilation

If you hand a beginner an AI that writes perfect code, they still end up writing buggy software. The bug isn't in the syntax, it's in the mental model. Writing code is just the final leaf node of a massive tree of assumptions. If you don't understand the edge cases, the state transitions, or how the pieces actually compose, you are just prompting your way into a local minimum. Engineering is about the architectural taste of knowing why a system fails, even when the compiler says it's fine.