Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

There's a weird insecurity I've noticed cropping up. I want to design the codebase 'my way'. I want to decide on the fundamental data structures. But there's this worry that my preferred architecture is not massively better than whatever the machine comes up with. So by insisting on 'my way' I'm robbing everyone productivity.

I know most true programmers will vouch for me and my need to understand. But clients and project managers and bosses? Are they really gonna keep accepting a refrain like this from their engineers?

"either it gets done in a day and I understand none of it, or it gets done in a month and I fully understand it and like it"

Until an LLM or some new form of AI can manage an entire architecture itself, I say we need a middle ground. Something will always go wrong, and understanding of the system is necessary to troubleshoot.

Not sure if a developer would ever say that to their manager. Agreed on the need to 100% fully understand what's going on. Otherwise the "AI can get it done in a day" is extremely high risk to the business. Junior may not be able to recognize a half-baked solution that doesn't follow existing patterns, poor security, poor performance, etc.