Data Bricklaying Diary

Aug 21, 2026 · R&D Management

Feature Complete ≠ Production Ready: Why AI Coding Demands Engineering Discipline

This article argues that AI can rapidly generate functional code but cannot lower the engineering bar for production readiness, which requires risk-matched baselines, independent verification, and accountable gates — illustrated through a batch-import example showing the gap between happy-path code and real-world constraints like retries, idempotency, observability, and rollback.