For young developers, artificial intelligence can shorten the distance between an idea and a working prototype. But it can also deliver code faster than the judgement needed to assess it. That tension is central to software engineer Yousaf Fayyaz’s mentoring work. Fayyaz works with younger developers on AI-assisted coding, prompting and agentic workflows. His focus is less on how quickly tools produce code than on what happens before and after generation: define the problem, provide the right context, then review the output before it enters a product. Coding assistants can generate components, suggest implementations and troubleshoot errors. For early-career developers or small teams, that can speed up prototyping. Yet faster implementation does not remove the engineering decisions around requirements, architecture, security, testing and maintainability. That is why verification is a recurring theme in Fayyaz’s mentoring. Developers are encouraged to understand what an AI system produced, test its assumptions…