The instincts can absolutely be developed faster with AI — if you set it up right. I work with an AI partner daily and one thing I've noticed is that it's a brutal mirror: it exposes gaps in your thinking immediately because it does exactly what you tell it, not what you meant.

That feedback loop, hundreds of times a day, compresses years of learning into months. The catch is you need guardrails — tests that fail when the AI drifts, review cycles you can't skip, architecture constraints it must respect.

That's what builds the instincts: not the AI doing the work for you, but the AI showing you where your understanding breaks down, fast enough that you actually learn from it. Just-In-Time Learning.