For the last year or two, AI has quietly become the most-used tool in my workflow. I write Swift with Claude. I sketch architecture with it. I debug with it. I ask it to explain other people's code. I use it for personal projects — a habit tracker here, a recipe parser there. It's no longer a thing I "try sometimes." It's the thing I reach for before Google. And yet — I've never stopped to learn what's actually happening inside the box. I don't know what an embedding is , not really. I've read the words "vector database" forty times and I couldn't explain to a junior dev why we need one. I can name "RAG" and "agents" and "fine-tuning" the way someone can name three French cheeses without having tasted any of them. I know how to use AI. I do not know how it works . That's a strange place to be eleven years into a software engineering career. The honest reason I waited I'm a senior iOS developer. Eleven-plus years. Swift, Objective-C, the whole evolution. Java and Kotlin from before that.…