[buschleague]

This is exactly right. The mental model gap is the real risk for AI-first builders. The code works until it doesn't, and when it breaks you have no framework for understanding why.

One thing that helped us: externalize the structure that experienced developers carry in their heads. Things like test driven development or wheel-and-spoke based file size limitations etc. are the distilled judgment of decades of software engineering. But if you've never written code traditionally, you don't know they exist.

We formalized these into enforced workflows. What I found pretty exciting about it, from an educational tool standpoint, is that the side effect was that new team members and vibe coders working within those constraints started absorbing the patterns themselves. They learn why tests matter because the system won't let them skip them and learn why file size matters because the system blocks them and forces decomposition etc.