Understand before you use

Here's how it happens, and it's seductive.

You ask AI for code. It gives you twenty lines. You paste them in. It works. You move on, feeling fast and productive.

Three weeks later something breaks inside those twenty lines. You can't fix it — you never understood it. So you ask again, get different code, paste that in, and hope.

You now have a program you can't maintain, can't explain and can't extend. You didn't build it. You collected it.

One rule, and it's simple to state:

Never use code you can't explain.

Not "never use AI code" — using it is fine. But before it goes into your project, you must be able to say what each line does and why it's there.

If you can't, you have two honest options: ask until you understand it, or don't use it.

This isn't about purity. It's practical. Code you don't understand is code you can't debug, and debugging is most of programming.