How I Stop AI Coding Agents From “Improving” Away Important Features
An AI coding agent will happily hand you a refactor that is smaller, cleaner, better named — and quietly missing a feature.
It is not being careless. It genuinely cannot tell which parts of your code are load-bearing. The append-only trigger on a ledger table looks like clutter. The NULL in a foreign key column looks like a bug. The weird cap on one code path looks like dead code left over from something.
So on this project I keep a list called preservation anchors: things that must not change, written down where the agent will actually read them. This post is about how that list works, the three levels of enforcement behind it, and the one time the whole system failed anyway — which turned out to be the most useful thing that happened.
Last time I said the next post would be about building a paywall for...
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