For a while now, I've been quietly embarrassed about something, and I think a lot of junior devs are quietly dealing with the same thing — so let's talk about it instead of hiding it.
The Pattern
More times than I'd like to admit, I've walked into a task without fully understanding it. Not "I understood 80% and figured out the rest" — I mean genuinely unclear on what was being asked, why it mattered, or what the actual requirement was. And instead of stopping to figure that out, I'd jump straight to producing a solution — often leaning heavily on AI to generate something that looked right.
It worked, on the surface. Code got written. PRs got opened. Things moved.
Until my senior asked me one simple question during a task walkthrough:
