> looking at the code itself is suboptimal and often pointless

yeah I was having a convo with AI about this recently

I was like, I recognize AI tools are useful, but I don't end up using them as much as I'd like to

and the conversation kind of went towards acknowledging how dramatic the shift has been from using search engines to get ideas about how to manually code, to just sharing ideas for other people to maybe implement in their own way using AI

So, there were all kinds of buzz phrases that popped up like about "prompts as source code" and "spec driven development" and "context engineering" which just kind of confirmed for me that I think some of my "slowdown" with coding with AI has been due to a shift from this manual coding with search engine assistance to sharing ideas and letting AI do the actual coding

Manual review akin to skimming while reading and then reading in depth specific passages that need "deeper focus" is probably something to consider keeping doing