The Ground Rules
You think of the AI as a smart collaborator. It isn't. It's a pattern-matching engine that will confidently do the wrong thing and not tell you. Once you understand what it actually is, everything else makes sense.
You're shipping with AI agents. The code works. Mostly. For now. This book is about what happens next — and how to make sure it doesn't surprise you.
"The AI told you it was done. You shipped it. You shouldn't have — but you had no way to know that yet."
"You've corrected the same thing three times and it keeps coming back. That's not a prompt problem."
"You're shipping faster than ever. You also have no idea how half your codebase works. Both things are true."
What's inside
You think of the AI as a smart collaborator. It isn't. It's a pattern-matching engine that will confidently do the wrong thing and not tell you. Once you understand what it actually is, everything else makes sense.
The agent says done. It isn't. Your instructions get ignored after a long session. A fix that worked yesterday breaks something else today. You've been here. These failures aren't random — they're structural, and they happen to everyone.
Not prompting tricks. Not workarounds. Patterns that match how these systems actually behave — short sessions, real verification, written plans before any code, hard stops before anything irreversible. Things that work even when the AI is being the AI.
You hire someone. Now two people are prompting the same codebase differently. Or you add a second AI agent and suddenly nothing is reliable. Or a user finds a way to make your AI do things you never intended. This part is about before that happens.
The AI wrote most of your codebase. Do you own it? Can you sell it? Can anyone else work in it? What happens when you need to fix something the AI wrote six months ago and you have no idea what it does? This part is about the questions founders don't ask until it's too late.
The AI said done. Something broke in prod. You fixed it, then it broke somewhere else. You've been faster than ever and somehow more anxious than ever. This book explains why — and what to do about it.
Read the first chapter free