Every AI app I've shipped recently rewrote the same plumbing. The OAuth dance for Slack. Encrypted storage for an API key. Refresh-token logic that finally fails on the 3rd call after an hour. Wiring up an MCP client to a server behind a bearer token someone pasted into a Notion page.
Part 2 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract - what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. Stripe never skipped the boring stuff. They ship 1,300 AI PRs a week. Amazon skipped it. Their storefront went down for six hours. Kent Beck wrote the answer in Extreme Programming Explained in 1999. We read it. Then chose velocity anyway. A friend of mine leads engineering at a funde