Can AI Really Understand Your Entire Project? I Tested It on a Real Application
There's a particular kind of conversation that happens when a new developer joins a project that's already been running for a year. "Walk me through the authentication flow." Twenty minutes of explanation, questions, and the new developer's growing expression of polite confusion as each answer spawns two more questions. "Why is this in this folder?" Because of a decision made eight months ago when the structure was different, never documented, now just history. "Why doesn't this API follow the same pattern as the others?" Because one of those endpoints was added by someone who'd moved on before we standardized the approach. Onboarding is expensive. It's expensive in experienced developer time, in the time the new person spends finding things through indirect experience rather than documentation, and in the mistakes that happen in the gap between "I think I understand how this works" and "I actually understand how th...