Most of the downsides of inviting AI into your software development workflow can be mitigated by insisting on understanding everything you let it do.

Screenshot of a conversation with an AI assistant. The user asks: “Explain to me how the ‘rebuilding intermediate property list dictionaries’ was happening before.”&10;&10;The assistant explains that in the old implementation, the method arrayOfPostsFromPath: in MEWeblog+Persistence.m (line 75) processed each post file by first enumerating filenames in a folder, then constructing a string path to the post or its inner Info.plist-style content file. It then called dictionaryWithContentsOfFile: to deserialize the plist into a new in-memory NSDictionary, and passed that dictionary to [[MEWeblogEntry alloc] initWithPersistenceDictionary:].&10;&10;This meant each post load involved an extra full-object materialization step: disk plist to temporary NSDictionary to MEWeblogEntry. The “intermediate property list dictionary” refers to that temporary NSDictionary object (thisPostDict) created in the old code.&10;&10;The assistant explains that the newer implementation skips this extra step and instead calls [[MEWeblogEntry alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:postItemURL]. This initializer, defined in MEWeblogEntry.m (line 450), resolves bundle URLs correctly and allows the base loader to read directly from the URL. As a result, the loading flow is simpler and avoids constructing a separate temporary dictionary for each post.&10;&10;The explanation concludes by noting why this change matters for issue #7117: on blogs with many cached posts, repeatedly creating dictionaries adds significant allocation and parsing overhead. The old code also lost the original post URL context because it built entries from raw dictionaries rather than using URL-backed initialization.

*****
Written on