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 article compares human “rockstar” developers—who produce clever but inscrutable code—with AI tools that can churn out massive, disjointed codebases. It shows how both create unmaintainable systems and recommends guiding AI to generate small, understandable snippets, slowing down to match architecture to problem complexity, and keeping craftsmanship in human hands.

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.

This article discusses the dangers of accumulating technical debt, especially in the context of rapid AI advancements. While it may seem beneficial to defer debt repayment for future improvements, this approach can lead to an overwhelming complexity that even AI tools can't manage. Developers must balance short-term gains with long-term sustainability.