Engineers still own five decisions.

Video caption

Engineers still own five decisions.

A later route exposes conflicting assumptions.

Each row gets an owner, fixture and expected outcome.

Require the five contracts when the change crosses them.

#EricFieldNotes

Full written post / accessibility read

A capable agent can generate a feature in minutes. It cannot make the organization choose which record is true, who may change it, what a retry means, how old data migrates, or how a partial failure recovers. Those five decisions sit beneath almost every consequential workflow.

In an illustrative approval flow, a new UI works for fresh requests. An imported old approval lacks the new reviewer field. One agent treats it as valid; another queues it for reapproval. The interface was fine. The migration policy was never decided.

Record authority of data, permission, retry, migration and recovery. For each, write one counterexample that would expose a wrong choice. Let the agent propose options, then have the accountable engineer and product owner select the policy before implementation spreads.

A release gate should ask for the relevant decision record and run its protected fixture. Do this because architecture quality is not a property of how quickly a feature screen appeared; it is the team's ability to defend the hidden state transitions.

#EricFieldNotes

Four-beat scene transcript

1. Engineers still own five decisions.

A capable agent can generate a feature in minutes. It cannot make the organization choose which record is true, who may change it, what a retry means, how old data migrates, or how a partial failure recovers. Those five decisions sit beneath almost every consequential workflow.

Visual: Code generation makes them easier to postpone.

2. The screen passes while the contract is blank.

In an illustrative approval flow, a new UI works for fresh requests. An imported old approval lacks the new reviewer field. One agent treats it as valid; another queues it for reapproval. The interface was fine. The migration policy was never decided.

Visual: A later route exposes conflicting assumptions.

3. Put five rows in the release packet.

Record authority of data, permission, retry, migration and recovery. For each, write one counterexample that would expose a wrong choice. Let the agent propose options, then have the accountable engineer and product owner select the policy before implementation spreads.

Visual: Each row gets an owner, fixture and expected outcome.

4. Make judgment visible in the harness.

A release gate should ask for the relevant decision record and run its protected fixture. Do this because architecture quality is not a property of how quickly a feature screen appeared; it is the team's ability to defend the hidden state transitions.

Visual: Require the five contracts when the change crosses them.

Research and claim limits

• METR randomized trial (S20)
• Stack Overflow 2025 developer survey (S21)

The examples identified as illustrative or simulated are design probes, not reported incidents. Vendor specifications do not establish workload performance.