More rules should mean better output. That's the intuition. I spent weeks building a comprehensive CLAUDE.md — 200 lines covering naming conventions, security rules, error handling, architectural patterns, import ordering, type safety requirements, and more. I was proud of it. I'd thought through every scenario. Then I scored the output. 79.0 / 100. My carefully crafted documentation was actively
I'm a software engineer in Japan. I've been using AI coding assistants — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot — for about one years now. At some point I started keeping informal notes on how many prompt revisions it took to get production-quality output. After a few months, a pattern was hard to ignore. For tasks I described in Japanese: 4–6 revisions on average. 1–3. Same AI. Same model. Roughly similar
"Write a function to fetch the list of users." — same prompt, same codebase. Yesterday: getUsers(). Today: fetchUserList(). Tomorrow: loadAllUsers(). Six months of AI-assisted coding and I kept hitting this wall. My initial reaction was "maybe I need to write better prompts." I wrote better prompts. The functions got slightly better. New inconsistencies appeared elsewhere. The problem wasn't the A
Have you ever looked at code you wrote six months ago and thought: "Who wrote this monster?"? Relax, it happens to all of us. In software engineering, writing code that a machine understands is the easy part. The real challenge is writing code that other humans (including your future self) can understand, maintain, and scale. This is exactly where Software Design Principles come into play. In this
Part 1 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract — what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. SWE-CI tested 18 AI models across 71 consecutive commits. Most broke something on commit 47 they'd already broken on commit 1. That's not an intelligence problem. That's a learning system that isn't learning. A paper made me uncomfortable this month. Not because of what it found about