A three-person team gets two months to build a brand-new customer account portal. Dashboard, order history, order details, loyalty page, settings—the works. They ship on time. It looks gorgeous. Leadership is thrilled.
Three weeks after launch, finance pings the eng channel: "Why did our CDN bill triple last month?"
Perf team digs in. Core Web Vitals are in the toilet; CLS is glowing red in Search Console.
Turns out every single page was requesting the user’s full order history on load, then re-rendering the entire DOM on every keystroke in the settings form because somebody let the AI write the React state updates without debouncing.
I’ve lived some version of this story at least five times in the last four years. Different companies, different stacks, same probable root cause: engineers treating AI-generated code as "finished" or "good enough" instead of as a first draft.
The AI tools are better now, but somehow the standards aren’t. Now that the blast radius of a sloppy change is 10× what it used to be, the standard of quality must also 10x. A junior, misguided by StackOverflow in 2015, could push a bad regex and maybe break a few reports, but an AI-empowered junior in 2025 will let Copilot write an unbounded database query that costs the company six figures in egress fees before anyone notices.
The fine details used to be what separated senior engineers from the rest of the pack, but now that everyone has a senior engineer in their back pocket, it's the price of admission just to stay in the game.
Extreme attention to detail is no longer a differentiator. It’s the baseline. Anything less and you’re the most expensive kind of engineer there is: the one who ships fast and costs more later.
The Fire Hose in Untrained Hands
AI coding tools are the most powerful fire hose we’ve ever been handed. Crank it open and you get 5,000 lines of beautifully formatted, type-safe, and 100% "confident" code...that may or may not completely brick your system.
I’m glad I spent the first several years of my career without that hose. I had to read every line, understand every branch, and feel the pain of my own mistakes in real time. It’s what taught me the craft.
Today’s early-career engineers often start with the hose already on full blast. A few figure out how to aim it and become really good, really fast, but most don’t. Companies have noticed this, and junior to mid-level roles are drying up because nobody wants to pay for the cleanup crew anymore.
You think you can rely on human code reviews to make sure nothing busted gets through? Yeah right. I know I'm not the only one who's rubber-stamped AI-generated refactors that looked flawless, but quietly tripled production bandwidth usage. The ownership is on the engineer wielding the hose.
Ego + sprint pressure + blind trust = career-limiting move.
The Painting Is Never "Done" at 80%
Like a beautiful painting, lasting software takes shape in three acts:
- Rough sketch — architecture, major shapes, get the skeleton standing.
- Mid-tones — flesh out features, make it feel alive.
- Final pass — the excruciating, time-consuming, career-defining details.
AI crushes Act 1 and is pretty decent at Act 2. However it's catastrophically bad at Act 3 unless you stand over its shoulder with a magnifying glass and tell it exactly what’s missing.
That last 20% of polish is where the money is made—and where the money is lost. It’s also the part most engineers now skip because "the ticket is closed" or "Claude didn’t think we needed it."
Closing Thought
The bar shouldn't stay put so we can casually step over it. It's up to us to raise that bar and maintain the same level of craft that we know is possible.
Obsess over the details. Not because you must, but because you may.
...and because it's the only thing standing between you and becoming the cautionary tale in someone else’s post-mortem.