Madhav Haldia, Founding Engineer at Color, a published AI researcher who architects consumer AI systems from the ground up.
A few weeks ago, one of our mobile engineers spent half a day debugging an iOS distribution signing issue for an Expo app. The kind of problem where the answer depends on whether your team uses Xcode-managed automatic signing, what your provisioning profiles look like and a handful of other context-dependent factors. The AI coding agent confidently suggested four different fixes in sequence. Each was plausible. Each was wrong.
The engineer eventually solved it the old-fashioned way. He read Apple's documentation, checked our actual certificate setup and reasoned through it from first principles. The agent had been a distraction, not a co-pilot.
That moment forced a question I've been sitting with since. Are we choosing AI coding tools, or are AI coding tools choosing how we work?
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