Knowing How Much to Trust AI Requires Hands-On Experience, Not Rules

The degree to which developers can delegate tasks to AI depends heavily on the nature of the task and the specific model being used, according to a developer's reflections on the DEV Community. Simple, low-ambiguity tasks like minor UI color changes are easier to hand off, while decisions with broad product or policy implications require active human judgment alongside AI input. Rather than applying a fixed trust formula, the author argues that developers must build intuition through repeated use of multiple AI models in real work — similar to how a manager learns to calibrate trust in a teammate. The author illustrates this with a concrete example from building KIBAKO, a board game prototyping service, where AI served as a thinking partner to explore design options but did not make final product decisions. The key takeaway is that effective AI delegation is a skill developed through practice, not a threshold defined once and applied universally.