The Brain Sandwich

I was on a 1:1 with Emily, one of our strongest engineers, and we were mostly venting about some of the negatives about AI these days: the crazy amount of code reviews, how the job is changing, and the last one (which is the most relevant for this post), how engineers are sometimes completely removing their brains from the equation and just delegating their entire work to AI. (Btw, I heard that the cool kids are calling this a Meat Proxy.) But anyway, the reason I decided to post about this is that Emily has a very simple framework that she uses for working with AI, which she calls the “Brain Sandwich”, that solves this. It’s both about taking full advantage of AI without letting your engineering skills atrophy. The idea is very simple, and can be summarized by: whenever you work on something, you should use: Your brain, and then AI, and then Your brain Explaining a bit more… Before you tell the agent to start building anything, you go there and read and understand it first. You don’t…