I don’t have a formal software engineering background. HealthFirstAI is built with AI-assisted tools — Windsurf, mostly — which means the loop looks a little different from a typical engineering process.

Observe → talk to the people doing the work → understand the workflow as it actually happens, not as a form describes it → find the bottleneck → describe the change in plain language → let the AI tool generate the implementation → test it against a real case, not a synthetic one → ship → watch what breaks.

The part that doesn’t get talked about enough: AI-assisted doesn’t mean review-free. It means the review moves earlier. I can generate a migration or a new form in minutes. What I can’t outsource is knowing which five records in a live hospital database that migration will quietly break. That judgment still has to be mine, every time, before anything touches production.

The loop only works if each step is short. A long loop is where conviction quietly turns into assumption — and in a hospital, an unexamined assumption becomes someone’s chart.