AI Writes Code Fast. That's Exactly the Problem. Speed is not the enemy. Unmaintainable speed is. AI coding assistants can ship a working endpoint in minutes. What they can't do by default is ship one you can still safely touch six months later. I've seen this pattern repeatedly. Teams move fast, ship fast, celebrate fast. Then the codebase becomes a place people are afraid of. Every change breaks something unrelated. No one wants to be the one who touched it last. The cause is almost never complexity. It's coupling. What the AI Actually Hands You Ask any AI assistant to build an order creation endpoint. Here's what comes back: app . post ( ' /orders ' , async ( req , res ) => { const customer = await db . query ( ' SELECT * FROM customers WHERE id = ? ' , [ req . body . customerId ] ); if ( customer [ 0 ]. creditLimit < req . body . amount ) { return res . status ( 400 ). send ( " Order rejected: credit limit exceeded " ); } await db .…