Why AI code fails differently: What I learned talking to 200 engineering teams

8 points by pomarie 187 days ago | 5 comments

Hey HN, I'm Paul, co-founder of cubic (YC X25). Over the past few months, I've talked to over 200 engineering teams about how they're using AI to ship code.

I kept hearing the same pattern: some teams are shipping 10-15 AI PRs daily without issues. Others tried once, broke production, and gave up entirely.

The difference wasn't what I expected– it wasn't about model choice or prompt engineering.

---

One team shipped an AI-generated PR that took down their checkout flow.

Their tests and CI passed, but AI had "optimized" their payment processing by changing `queueAnalyticsEvent()` to `analytics.track()`. The analytics service has a 2-second timeout so when it's slow, payment processing times out.

In prod, under real load, 95th percentile latency went from 200ms to 8 seconds. Ended up with 3hh of downtime and $50k in lost revenue.

Everyone on that team knew you queue analytics events asynchronously, but that wasn't documented anywhere. It's just something they learned when analytics had an outage years ago.

*The pattern*

Traditional CI/CD catches syntax errors, type mismatches, test failures.

The problem is that AIs don't make these mistakes. (Or at least, tests and lints catch them before they get committed). The problem with AI is that it generates syntactically perfect code that violates your system's unwritten rules.

*The institutional knowledge problem*

Every codebase has landmines that live in engineers' heads, accumulated through incidents.

AIs can't know these, so they fall into the traps. It's then on the code reviewer to spot them.

*What the successful teams do differently*

They write constraints in plain English. Then AI enforces them semantically on every PR. Eg. "All routes in /billing/* must pass requireAuth and include orgId claim"

AI reads your code, understands the call graph, and blocks merges that violate the rules.

*The bottleneck*

When you're shipping 10x more code, validation becomes the constraint; not generation speed.

The teams shipping AI at scale aren't waiting for better models. They're using AI to validate AI-generated code against their institutional knowledge.

The gap between "AI that generates code" and "AI you can trust in production" isn't about model capabilities, it's about bridging the institutional knowledge gap.

veunes 186 days ago |

The observation is very accurate, but the conclusion is incomplete. The "unwritten rules" problem is, first and foremost, a symptom of a weak engineering culture and a lack of documentation. If a rule is critical to system stability (like the async analytics), it shouldn't be "living in engineers' heads"

Instead of layering on another AI for validation, maybe code generation should be used as a catalyst to finally formalize these rules. Turn them into custom linting rules, architectural tests (like with ArchUnit), or just well-written documentation that a model can be fine-tuned on. Using AI as a crutch for bad processes is a dangerous path

GreenGames 187 days ago |

Super interesting take Paul. Curious btw, how are these teams actually encoding their “institutional knowledge” into constraints? Like is it some manual config or more like natural‑language rules that evolve with the codebase?

pomarie 187 days ago | |

Good q! So it depends.

Some teams are using Claude or similar models in GitHub Actions, which automatically review PRs. The rules are basically natural language encoded in a YAML file that's committed in the codebase. Pretty lightweight to get started.

Other teams upgrade to dedicated tools like cubic. We have a feature where you can encode your rules either in our UI, or we're releasing a feature where you can write them directly in your codebase. We'll check them on every PR and leave comments when something violates a constraint.

The in-codebase approach is nice because the rules live next to the code they're protecting, so they evolve naturally as your system changes.

veunes 186 days ago | | |

The "in-codebase" approach is the right one, but a YAML file with plain text is a half-measure. The most reliable rule that "lives next to the code" is an architectural test. An ArchUnit test verifying that "all routes in /billing/* call requireAuth" is also code, it's versioned with the project, and it breaks the build deterministically That is a more robust engineering solution, unlike semantic text interpretation, which can fail

pomarie 187 days ago |

We're building something at cubic that helps with this. You write your constraints in plain English, and AI enforces them semantically on every PR.

If you're curious, you can check it out here: https://cubic.dev

Happy to answer any questions about what we've seen working (or not working) across different teams.