What an Academic Interview Taught Me About How I Actually Use AI

My cousin asked me 8 questions for a school project. I ended up questioning things I'd never stopped to articulate. My cousin Stephanie studies at Benedict Schulen Schweiz in Zurich. A few weeks ago she asked me to answer a questionnaire about AI in software development for one of her modules. Eight questions, she said. Shouldn't take long. It took longer than expected. Not because the questions were hard, but because I kept stopping to think "wait, do I actually believe this, or am I just repeating what everyone says?" This is the full version of what came out of that. How my workflow changed Before I started using AI seriously, hitting a wall meant going through the usual cycle: repository issues, Google, Stack Overflow, maybe asking someone. It worked. It just burned a lot of time before any actual building happened. Now, tools like Claude Code show up at nearly every stage of my day. Starting a new project, preparing for a meeting, mapping out risks, thinking through the structure