{"slug": "with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build", "title": "With AI, The Real Edge Is Knowing What to Build", "summary": "A developer argues that with AI making code cheap, the real edge for programmers is knowing what to build, not mastering syntax. The developer illustrates this with a legacy migration project for a hardware shop, where the challenge is deciding between refactoring, migration, or rewrite, rather than prompting an LLM to generate code.", "body_md": "*\"But... how did you know what to write?\"*\n\nThat's what [Greg Baugues' daughter asked him](https://dev.to/googleai/my-daughter-asked-if-developers-used-to-write-code-by-hand-but-it-was-the-follow-up-question-that-1bh8) after her first encounter with vibe-coding.\n\nShe was curious if there was a time when we had to type symbols, one by one.\n\nCoding used to be about the craft:\n\nMastering symbols and perfecting the lines of code.\n\nIf you knew what to type and could make it work, you could find your way as a coder.\n\nBut AI has changed our job description by making code cheap.\n\nAnyone is just a few sentences away from working code.\n\nKnowing what symbols to type isn't the edge anymore.\n\nAs I write this, I'm working on a legacy migration for a hardware shop.\n\nIts main page is an entangled mess of over 40K lines of Visual Basic code.\n\nMigrating it to anything newer is time-consuming.\n\nTo ease the pain of migrating it, management suggested starting some refactoring work.\n\nThe migration has dragged on for years, still far from completion.\n\nThe refactoring work won't show any visible progress on a late project.\n\nPrompt an LLM to migrate it to Blazor isn't hard.\n\nBut its output will only create more problems.\n\nThe challenge is deciding the right approach: refactoring, migration, or rewrite.\n\nThe real edge is knowing coding is solving problems and choosing what problems to solve.\n\n*To help you grow beyond syntax, check [Street-Smart Coding Manifesto](https://imcsarag.gumroad.com/l/streetsmartcodingmanifesto/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=ai-real-edge-is-knowing-what-build). When coding is cheap, your edge comes from outside your IDE.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/canro91/with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build-204f", "published_at": "2026-09-07 05:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-07 05:28:17.188589+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Greg Baugues"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/with-ai-the-real-edge-is-knowing-what-to-build.jsonld"}}