AI Strengths & Limits

Know what AI excels at and where you must stay in control.

✅ Let AI Handle

Task	Why AI Excels
Boilerplate code	Repetitive, pattern-based
Type definitions	Mechanical translation
Unit tests	Pattern matching on existing code
Refactoring	Systematic transformations
Documentation	Summarizing code intent
Error messages	Parsing and explaining
Regex patterns	Complex pattern syntax
SQL queries	Translation from natural language
CSS/styling	Tedious but deterministic
API integrations	Reading docs, writing adapters

❌ Stay in Control Of

Task	Why You Should Lead
Architecture decisions	Long-term implications
Security-critical code	Too important to delegate
Business logic	Domain knowledge required
Performance optimization	Requires measurement
Database schema design	Needs understanding of access patterns
UX decisions	Requires user empathy
Code review	Trust but verify
Deployment/infra	Environment-specific

The Delegation Framework

Rule of thumb: If you could explain it to a junior dev in under 5 minutes, AI can probably do it.

AI-Appropriate Tasks

"Convert this JavaScript to TypeScript"
"Add JSDoc comments to these functions"
"Write unit tests for this function"
"Create a form component with these fields"
"Parse this JSON and extract these fields"

Human-Required Tasks

"Decide between microservices vs monolith"
"Review this authentication flow for vulnerabilities"
"Design the data model for our new feature"
"Optimize these database queries" (need to measure first!)
"Decide what we should build next"

The Trust Spectrum

High Trust (let AI do it)          Low Trust (you do it)
|----------------------------------|
Boilerplate → Tests → Logic → Security → Architecture

Working Together

The best vibecoding combines both:

You: "We need to add rate limiting to protect our API"
     (Architecture decision - YOU)

AI: [Explains options, helps you decide]
     (Information gathering - AI)

You: "Let's use Redis sliding window, 100 req/min per IP"
     (Final decision - YOU)

AI: [Implements the rate limiter]
     (Implementation - AI)

You: [Reviews code, checks for security issues]
     (Verification - YOU)

Context Management Common Mistakes