This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Luke Tong
Can I Let AI Work While I Drink Coffee? A Hard-Learned Lesson
"Can I let AI work while I drink coffee?"
That was the question I asked myself recently.
The dream is simple: AI takes care of the heavy lifting, while I sit back and enjoy a latte. The reality, as I found out, is far more complicated.
The Story: Debugging a SOAP Microservice
I was working on a microservice that had to call downstream legacy systems.
- Downstream system A only supported SOAP 1.1.
- Downstream system B only supported SOAP 1.2.
When I ran the service, I got a nasty 500 Internal Server Error.
So I turned to AI for help.
AI quickly generated three suggestions and was about to try them one by one:
- Change the payload value from
20000to20000.00. - Add a non-mandatory field into the payload.
- Switch the client to use the correct SOAP 1.2 class instead of the wrong SOAP 1.1 one.
My Reaction
Looking at the list, I immediately thought:
- Option 1 and 2 would at most cause a 400 Bad Request (schema or validation issue).
- Option 3 was the real killer — a protocol mismatch that could definitely lead to a 500 Internal Server Error.
So I stopped AI right there and told it to skip straight to option 3.
And yes, that solved the problem.
The Lesson Learned
This experience taught me a few things:
AI is fast, but lacks sense of severity.
It treats cosmetic payload tweaks and fatal protocol mismatches as equals.Human expertise is still crucial.
An experienced engineer can immediately judge which error source is most plausible.Supervising AI can be exhausting.
If I have to stare at logs all the time, I don’t feel like I’ve delegated anything.
In short, AI felt less like an autopilot and more like a very fast but inexperienced intern.
How to Work Smarter With AI
So, what can we do to make AI genuinely useful without draining our attention?
Ask for explanations and prioritization first.
Don’t let AI execute fixes blindly. Have it rank possible causes with reasoning.Restrict the action scope.
Let AI propose fixes, but you decide which one to run.-
Provide a knowledge base.
Feed AI some rules like:-
500 + SOAP call → likely protocol/endpoint mismatch. -
400 → payload/schema issue.
-
This way, AI can learn from your experience instead of brute-forcing random fixes.
Wrapping Up
So, can I let AI work while I drink coffee?
Not yet.
But if I set up the right guardrails and workflows, maybe one day I really can.
Until then, I’ll keep one hand on my coffee and the other on the AI logs. ☕️👀
Have you had a similar experience supervising AI? Share your story — I’d love to hear how others balance trust and control.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Luke Tong
Luke Tong | Sciencx (2025-08-26T23:09:39+00:00) Can I Let AI Work While I Drink Coffee? A Hard-Learned Lesson. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/26/can-i-let-ai-work-while-i-drink-coffee-a-hard-learned-lesson/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.