AI Handled Two of My Hardest Weekly Tasks — Here's What the Data Showed (Week 9 Roundup)

This week I went deep on two things that have historically eaten a disproportionate chunk of my time: getting oriented in an unfamiliar codebase and writing SQL queries against schemas I don't own.

Let me give you the real numbers.

---

Getting up to speed on an unfamiliar codebase

On a recent project, a teammate handed me a ~40,000-line service I'd never touched. Old me would've spent half a day reading files, tracing call stacks, and pestering whoever built it with questions.

This time I fed the entry points and key modules into an AI assistant and asked structured questions — "what does this module own?", "what are the failure modes here?", "where does state live?" — iterating the way you'd interrogate a knowledgeable colleague.

Result: I had a working mental model in about 45 minutes. I filed my first meaningful PR in that codebase before lunch. That's a task that used to bleed into day two.

---

Writing SQL from plain English

Later in the week, I needed to pull a fairly complex report from a schema I hadn't worked with before — multi-table joins, some window functions, a few edge cases around NULLs.

I described what I needed in plain English, pasted in the relevant table definitions, and iterated on the output through three rounds of prompting. Total time: ~18 minutes. The query ran clean on the first real test against production data.

For context, my baseline for a query that complexity, working from scratch, is closer to 45–60 minutes — and that includes the debugging loop.

---

What this week actually confirmed

Both workflows share the same underlying mechanic: you're not outsourcing the thinking, you're compressing the orientation phase. The AI gets you to the point where your actual expertise kicks in, faster. That's where the leverage is.

The weeks where I see the biggest gains aren't the ones where AI writes something for me end-to-end — they're the weeks where it eliminates the slow ramp-up that happens before I'm even doing real work.

That pattern is worth paying attention to.

---

I break down one workflow like this every week in The AI Leverage Weekly — practical, no fluff, free. Subscribe: https://theaileverageweekly.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=roundup_w9