I spent last week skiing, and I learned something that hasn't left me since.
The hard runs aren't where you lose the day. It's the blues.
When you're tired, or sloppy, or just not paying attention on the easy slopes, you burn energy you didn't need to burn. Your form degrades. You muscle through turns instead of carving them. By the time you hit the black run you actually wanted to ski, you're already exhausted.
The good skiers I watched weren't saving their technique for the hard parts. They skied beautifully on everything. The greens, the blues, the flat bits between lifts. It wasn't showing off. It was conservation.
They'd done the math, even if they'd never thought about it explicitly: energy is finite, and the day is long.
You see where this is going.
In software, we save our focus for the "hard" problems. The architecture decisions. The performance optimizations. The gnarly bugs. Those are the black runs. That's where expertise is supposed to matter.
But the easy stuff — the CRUD endpoints, the config files, the routine pull requests — we half-arse those. We copy-paste. We don't think too hard. It's just a blue run. Who cares.
And then we wonder why we're exhausted by Thursday.
Every sloppy shortcut on a "simple" task is a small energy debt.
The config file you didn't quite understand but copied anyway? That's a future debugging session.
The test you skipped because "it's obvious"? That's a 2am mystery next month.
The pull request you approved without really reading because it was "just a small change"? That's technical debt with your name on it.
None of these feel expensive in the moment. But they compound. And they drain your reserves in ways you don't notice until you're facing something actually hard and you've got nothing left.
Here's the thing about AI-assisted development: it makes the easy stuff even easier to be sloppy on.
You can generate a hundred lines of boilerplate without thinking. You can scaffold entire features by describing them vaguely. The blue runs have never been more frictionless.
But frictionless isn't the same as free.
When you let AI generate code you don't fully understand, you're skiing with bad form. It looks fast. It feels efficient. But you're spending energy you don't know you're spending — the future energy of understanding, debugging, maintaining code that isn't quite yours.
The developers I see struggling with AI aren't struggling on the hard problems. They're drowning in accumulated confusion from all the "easy" stuff they let slide.
The best skiers go fast. Faster than me, certainly. But they're always in control. They could stop if they needed to. They know where their weight is. They're not surviving the slope — they're choosing their line.
That's the goal with AI too. Go fast, but stay in control.
Understand what's being generated. Read it before you commit it. Keep your form clean even when the tool makes sloppiness possible. Especially then.
Because the moment you lose the ability to stop and explain what your code does, you're not skiing anymore. You're falling with style.
One more thing from the slopes: being tired makes everything harder.
It sounds obvious, but I'm amazed how often I forget it. When I'm well-rested, problems that seemed impossible yesterday become tractable. Code that confused me makes sense. Decisions that felt agonizing become clear.
When I'm exhausted, even the easy stuff feels hard. And that's when the sloppy form creeps in.
There's no hack for this. You can't AI your way out of fatigue. The only solution is the boring one: sleep, recovery, sustainable pace.
The day is long. Conserve your energy. Ski well on the blues.
And for god's sake, get some rest before you try the black runs.