92 posts on engineering, architecture, and technical craft.
AI-Driven Development was born in software, but the method is domain-independent. The producer is now an AI in every knowledge-work domain — so the same loop applies: constrain the what, free the how, verify by evidence. The framework for the whole series.
11 min readAI support drafts are fluent and frequently wrong — invented policy, steps that don't exist. ADD makes the source-of-truth the contract, factuality-against-source the red test, and a measured hallucination rate the evidence — so confident wrong answers are caught before they reach a customer.
10 min readAI can emit Terraform and runbooks that read correct and provision the wrong, insecure, or irreversible thing. ADD makes policy-as-code the frozen contract enforced in the pipeline, chaos and rollback tests the red tests, and SLO evidence — not a clean apply — the proof a change is safe.
11 min readCompliance is where ADD's gates fit most naturally. AI control documentation reads thorough and can map to nothing real; ADD names every violation, freezes the control framework, makes control tests the red tests, and treats every finding as a hard stop.
13 min readWhen agents and teams produce more than any leader can read, line-by-line review collapses. ADD reframes the job: the ADR and its fitness functions are the frozen contract, fitness checks are the red tests, and production evidence — not a clean diagram — is how direction is verified.
13 min readAn AI-built model reconciles at a glance and hides a broken assumption or a double-count. ADD locks the assumption set as the frozen contract, makes reconciliation and integrity checks the red tests, and verifies by backtest against actuals — not by whether the numbers look reasonable.
15 min readAI screening reads objective and can be quietly biased. ADD makes the calibrated rubric the frozen contract, a gold-set plus counterfactual bias probes the red tests, and adverse-impact tracking the evidence — so a human, never the model alone, owns every decision about a person.
11 min readML is AI building AI, and a high headline metric hides leakage, gamed proxies, and slice regressions. ADD locks the eval set, thresholds, and model card as the frozen contract, makes the held-out suite the red tests, and verifies by slices and online evidence — not by the leaderboard number.
14 min readLegal is where ADD maps most literally — the negotiation playbook is the frozen contract. AI drafts and redlines read authoritative and can quietly concede a material term; ADD makes playbook-conformance the red test and an adversarial redline the evidence, with off-playbook concessions a hard stop.
12 min readAI floods marketing with on-brand-looking copy that is off-strategy. ADD fixes it: the brief is the spec (with named refusal reasons), brand and claims are the frozen contract, the A/B test is verification by evidence, and performance folds into a living playbook.
11 min read