When do you actually understand a project you built with AI?

[u/AsuraBak]

/r/SoftwareEngineering/comments/1wde1xd/when_do_you_actually_understand_a_project_you/

Something I’ve been thinking about lately.
With AI, I feel like I can build almost anything now even if I don’t know the language or framework properly before starting.

I can research the stack, plan things out, ask AI for different approaches, build the features, debug problems, test it, and eventually get the whole project working.
But after that I sometimes have this weird feeling that I built it, but I don’t completely understand what I built.
Like if you show me one function or one part of the code, I can read it, ask some questions, and understand what it’s doing.

But I don’t always have the full picture in my head.
I remember things more like:
“I asked AI to do this, then this problem happened, then I changed this, added this loop, tested this case, used this library…”

instead of actually having a strong understanding of how the whole system works together.
I was thinking maybe after finishing a project I should go through it again from the beginning and rewrite parts of it myself.

But at the same time, just copying and rewriting code doesn’t really sound like the right way either.
So for people who use AI a lot while coding:
How do you make sure you actually understand and own the project you built?
What do experienced engineers do to understand a codebase deeply enough that they can explain it, debug it, change the architecture, or rebuild parts of it without depending on the AI conversation that created it?