AI blogs

Most React projects start small. A components folder, an App.jsx , a handful of pages. It's quick to set up, easy to navigate, and good enough for what the project is at that moment. Then the project grows. Features accumulate. The components folder fills up with files that have nothing to do with each other. API calls appear inside page components, then inside other components, then scattered everywhere. A utility function gets written twice because nobody remembered the first one existed. A new developer joins and spends half a day figuring out where things are. This is the common trajectory, and it's not the result of bad developers — it's the result of a structure that was appropriate for a small project and never got reconsidered as the project scaled. A good React project folder structure doesn't solve these problems automatically, but it makes them easier to avoid. More importantly, it makes the codebase easier to maintain, debug, and hand off — which is th...

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...

There's a specific kind of confidence that settles in after you've been living inside a codebase for several weeks. You've written most of it yourself. You've debugged it, iterated on it, watched it evolve from a rough scaffold into something that actually works. The tests pass. The features behave as expected. You look at the code and feel, if not exactly proud, then at least comfortable. This was mine, and it was fine. That's exactly the mental state where blind spots grow. The project was a task management application for small teams — a full-stack build with a React frontend, a Node.js backend, a PostgreSQL database, and a REST API connecting them. About eight weeks of work, including a fair amount of refactoring as the feature set evolved. Not a massive codebase — around five thousand lines of meaningful code — but substantial enough that I couldn't hold the whole thing in my head at once. I'd been reading about using AI for code review as a compleme...