Not satire. But I can understand why my comment seemed contradictory. I've been designing software for a long time, but I'm nowhere near as good as most career

Not satire. But I can understand why my comment seemed contradictory. I've been designing software for a long time, but I'm nowhere near as good as most career SDEs I know (my career path has been SDE-adjacent). So it's not like I sat down and independently told various LLMs how to build out all these guardrails. I make high level architecture decisions and nudge them in the right direction ("use RabbitMQ", "trunk-based branching, not gitflow", etc). A lot of this stuff evolved piecemeal and organically. But at no point was a churning out garbage and I never had a runaway agent completely derail the project (or my budget). But, thinking about it more, I guess there are some things I might have done differently than most people: - I started with documentation: user interview --> user stories --> functional spec --> frozen design contract. These were all done before I wrote any code. - I specified the tech stack and the architecture in broad strokes, rather than let the LLMs make that decision. I went with boring choices because that's what I know best: Flask/Jinja, Alpine.js, Postgres. - I've constantly gone back and refactored accumulated tech debt and have added hard CI gates for things like cyclomatic complexity, ensuring that docs don't drift from the underlying code, and an "apparatus ledger" that keeps track of all the rules and constraints that keep getting added. - I make sure that each session proves that it's tests can fail before shipping a PR, so it's not writing meaningless tests. Maybe I'm underestimating how impactful all those things add up to shape the behavior of the LLM agents? Because individually, I wouldn't expect them to have saved my from nearly all the AI pitfalls I read about.