AI Coding Tools: The Greenfield Fantasy vs Brownfield Reality
This is Part 3 of the Velocity vs Value series. Previously: The Velocity Trap. Here’s a demo that writes itself: an engineer types a natural language description, and an AI agent generates a complete microservice in three minutes. Working tests. Clean structure. The audience applauds. Here’s what they don’t show you: that same AI agent, pointed at a five-year-old enterprise codebase with custom ORM patterns, undocumented business rules, and three layers of abstraction that made sense in 2021 — producing code that compiles, passes lint, and does the wrong thing in production. ...