I have been writing software for 15 years. I started in a world where every deploy was manual, every codebase had tribal knowledge nobody wrote down, and every new project was a fresh fight with someone else's unfinished ideas. The last couple of years changed something important. AI coding tools stopped being autocomplete and started being real collaborators. Not magic, not a replacement for thinking, but something new. And I noticed that most developers around me were using them wrong. This is how I use them today. AI is not autocomplete Most people I know open Copilot, accept the suggestion, move on. That is fine for boilerplate. It does not work for the kind of work I do, which is mostly brownfield: unfamiliar codebases, legacy systems, messy constraints. When I work with Claude Code on real code, I do not start by typing. I start by preparing context, creating .MD files. What does this part of the system do? What are the dangerous spots? What patterns does the team already follow?…