This article lays out seven hard-learned rules every engineer breaks at least once—like “rollback first, debug later,” testing backups by restoring them, and always having a tested rollback plan. It also covers handling external failures, using four-eyes checks for risky changes, logging trade-offs, and avoiding “temporary” fixes that stick around forever.

The author revisits Fred Brooks’s classic software lessons in the era of AI coding agents, arguing that while agents wipe out accidental complexity, they amplify essential design challenges and generate unprecedented technical debt. He warns of new “agentic” tar pits, scope creep, and coordination overhead as AI swarms bloat codebases and shift the real work back to human judgment and taste.