The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. The default behavior of any AI coding agent is to take the shortest path to “done.” Ask for a feature and it writes the feature. It doesn’t ask whether you have a spec, write a test before the implementation, consider whether the change crosses a trust boundary, or check what the PR will look like to a reviewer. It produces code, declares victory, and moves on. This is the same failure mode every senior engineer has spent their career learning to avoid. The senior version of any task includes work that doesn’t show up in the diff: surfacing assumptions, writing the spec, breaking the work into reviewable chunks, choosing the boring design, leaving evidence that the result is correct, sizing the change so a human can actually review it. Those steps are most of what separates engineers who ship reliable software at scale from people who push code that breaks.…