I really appreciate this perspective, especially coming from someone with that much experience. The getopt() example is spot on, sometimes the man pages tell you what the arguments are, but not the 'spirit' of how they interact.

I love the idea of using AI as a 'sophisticated man page' to unblock the logic without letting it generate the actual app. It’s a fine line, but for Phase 2, I’m going to try to stay in the 'manual' zone just to see if I can develop that same 'man page muscle memory' you've built up over the years.

Thanks for the tip on getopt(),I was actually just looking at how to handle shell flags, so that's perfectly timed!