Writing · 2026
How I Build With AI
The question every interview asks now: how do you actually use AI in your work? Here's the real answer — the loop, the judgment, and the verification system that makes AI-accelerated development fast without making it sloppy.
The honest version
There are two bad answers to “how do you use AI to build?” One is “I don't” — which in 2026 means leaving a force multiplier on the table. The other is “I let it write everything” — which means shipping code you don't understand. I do neither. I treat AI as the fastest junior engineer I've ever worked with: tireless, occasionally brilliant, occasionally confidently wrong — and never the one accountable for what merges. That's still me.
The proof
I built Parkzy — a live App Store marketplace (5.0★, 1,000+ downloads) — end to end as sole engineer: ~3,600 commits in 10 months, 392 database migrations, 163 serverless edge functions, with production LLM features. I built Gosan, a native macOS DAW, in about ten days. That velocity is impossible the old way — and reckless the naive way. The entire difference between the two is the system around the speed.
What I delegate, what I own
I work in a tight plan → generate → verify loop. I own every part that needs judgment: the architecture, the data model, what the product should even do, and the review of every line before it lands. I hand off the parts that are mechanical or fully specified — boilerplate, migrations, test scaffolding, wide refactors, the first draft of a function. I never merge code I haven't read and understood. The AI writes fast; I decide what's correct.
Velocity without verification is just faster bugs
This is the part most people skip, and it's the whole game. Speed only compounds if it's safe. So every change runs a gauntlet: Playwright end-to-end tests, Vitest, and Deno suites in CI; Sentry for what escapes into production; PostHog to check that a feature actually helped a real user. And a human reviews every merge. The tests aren't bolted on at the end — they're what lets me move this fast without breaking what's live. AI-accelerated, not AI-sloppy.
I don't just use AI — I build with it
The tools are one layer; the interesting work is a level up. I write agentic workflows — Claude Code automations that audit a codebase, check migrations for drift, and gate releases — so my own process improves itself. It's the same muscle I'd bring to building agentic features and automations for a client: not prompting a chatbot, but engineering a system that reasons and acts, with guardrails.
Why this is the job now
The multiplier was never “AI writes my code.” It's judgment about what to hand off, the discipline to verify everything, and the taste to know when the machine is wrong — applied at several times the old speed. That's senior engineering in 2026, and it's exactly what I do for teams. If that's the kind of engineer you're looking for, let's talk.