AF 447 was caused by not being "ahead of the plane", or not being "10% smarter than the piece of equipment you're operating".
Pilots speak of being ahead of the plane as the mental state of understanding the current condition of the aircraft, and being able to correctly forecast the end result of any control action on the current state.
This is like driving a well maintained car. You know the car will "follow" your directions.
Reasoning "behind the plane" is a state where the plane has started to do something, and you have to figure out what changed; I.e. the actual plane is no longer equivalent to your mental model of the plane. You can no longer with any certainty forecast the end behavior of the plane on your understanding alone. You're essentially in a reactive state. You have to rebuild your model.
AF447 suffered a major automation casualty. The pilot's didn't realize this, and attempted to fly off their flawed mental models of the plane's behavior. For instance, the Stall alert becoming active when the pilot tried pitching the aircraft down being unsilenced due to the automation coming back within non-extreme input regimes. The pilot attempted to avoid the alert by returning to the extremis instead of pitching down through the alert to recoverable flight.
Did the pilot's know that the alert would silence beyond an extreme value? No, but instinct told them if they did something that caused a stall response, reverse it to get away. Without the extra intelligence around how the automation worked, heuristic reasoning led to a valid, but ultimately lethally unsound course of action.