I run two AI assistants from different vendors against each other on every non-trivial decision, with a human (me) sitting in the middle as the routing authority. What's surprised me most is not that they disagree — it's how they disagree. They drift toward agreeing with me too quickly, then with each other too quickly, and I've had to design specific friction into the workflow to keep their disagreement productive. Writing this down because I think the friction patterns might be useful to other people running similar setups. What this is I've been working as an operations / systems engineer for about twenty years. Networks first, then servers, then config management, then incident response. The kind of role where the job is mostly making sure nothing breaks , and where every change request comes with a runbook, a verification step, and a rollback plan. In the last year and a half, AI coding assistants pulled me into the software side of the house.…