1 min lesson
Guardrails - name the limits to earn the trust
Use two rows in "Guardrails - name the limits to earn the trust" to state the practical decision rules.
Step 1 of 2
Guardrails - name the limits to earn the trust
The fastest way to lose a senior engineer is to imply the agent is infallible. The fastest way to win one is to be precise about where to trust it and where a human must stay in the loop.
- Trust the agent more
- Boilerplate, scaffolding, repetitive edits
- Keep a human firmly in the loop
- Security-sensitive code, auth, crypto, payments logic
- Trust the agent more
- Tests where pass/fail is the check
- Keep a human firmly in the loop
- Architectural decisions and public API design
- Trust the agent more
- Codebase Q&A and explanation
- Keep a human firmly in the loop
- Anything touching production data or migrations
- Trust the agent more
- Local, reviewable refactors
- Keep a human firmly in the loop
- Changes the reviewer can't fully understand at review time
| Trust the agent more | Keep a human firmly in the loop |
|---|---|
| Boilerplate, scaffolding, repetitive edits | Security-sensitive code, auth, crypto, payments logic |
| Tests where pass/fail is the check | Architectural decisions and public API design |
| Codebase Q&A and explanation | Anything touching production data or migrations |
| Local, reviewable refactors | Changes the reviewer can't fully understand at review time |
Credibility comes from drawing this line clearly, not from pretending it doesn't exist.