Code Quality in the AI Era: The Guardrails You Can't Skip
This is the final post in the Velocity vs Value series. Previously: The Velocity Trap, AI Greenfield vs Brownfield, and Measuring What Matters. AI coding tools accelerate delivery — we’ve covered the data in this series. They’re genuinely valuable. But acceleration without visibility creates a specific risk: quality degradation that nobody notices until it compounds. Here’s how it plays out: an AI tool generates a feature in 20 minutes. It passes all automated tests. CI is green. The PR is merged. Velocity: +1. Two weeks later, a security audit flags a pattern. A month later, a production issue traces back to a function with cyclomatic complexity of 47. Three months later, the module is hard to modify because the generated code lacks documentation and clear structure. ...