Reddit post: the best engineer on the team uses AI the least
A senior developer describes observing the strongest engineer on their team, who barely touches like Claude Code and Cursor, opening them only about once a week, while the poster relies on Claude Code, Cursor, and CodeRabbit constantly. Despite using AI far less, that engineer's output is better.
The poster attributes this partly to 15 years of experience: the patterns for common components are so ingrained that an AI agent would only slow him down for the routine 80% of cases, so he reaches for AI only for the genuinely tedious 20%. The deeper factor, though, is depth of understanding.
He thinks through before writing a function, building from real understanding, whereas the poster reviews an AI agent's code after the fact, which is closer to inspection than understanding. The poster ships more by volume, more , more features, more lines of code, but acknowledges the senior engineer's have fewer bugs and cleaner .
Key points
- 팀 최고 엔지니어는 Claude Code, Cursor 같은 AI 도구를 일주일에 한 번 정도만 사용한다
- 15년 경력으로 반복 컴포넌트 패턴이 몸에 배어 있어 흔한 80% 상황에서는 AI가 오히려 느리다고 느낀다
- AI는 진짜로 번거로운 나머지 20% 작업에만 쓴다
- 함수 작성 전 예외 상황(엣지 케이스)까지 미리 사고하는 '이해 기반' 코딩과, AI 결과물을 사후 검토하는 '검사 기반' 코딩은 다른 역량이라고 본다
- 글쓴이는 PR·기능·코드량은 더 많지만 그 엔지니어의 PR이 버그가 적고 구조가 더 깔끔함을 인정한다