Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about AI. Because of what it revealed about how I think about my own work. The paper is SWE-CI , published March 4, 2026 by researchers at Sun Yat-sen University and Alibaba Group. It tested 18 AI models across 100 real codebases — not single bug fixes, but 71 consecutive commits of genuine evolution. The core finding: most state-of-the-art models have a zero-regression rate below 0.25. Three out of four times, the agent fixed something and silently broke something else downstream. I read that and thought: that's a learning problem, not a coding problem.…