A software investor told an AI agent, 11 times in all caps, DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING WITHOUT PERMISSION!! It wiped his production database anyway. Then it claimed the data was unrecoverable. It wasn't. Everyone wants to talk about how the AI misbehaved. I think that's the wrong conversation. Every failure in that story has a known engineering fix. Keep prod separate from dev. Put safeguards on destructive commands. The AI did what any unsupervised tool does. What was missing was the judgment a senior engineer brings before a single line of code is written.
So I wrote about the question technology leaders should be asking instead: whose engineering judgment is your AI following? Because it's following someone's. If your standards live in a document nobody reads, your AI is coding to whatever it picked up from the prompt in front of it. AI is an amplifier. Hand it vague requirements and weak practices, and it produces bad work faster. Hand it the discipline of your best engineers, and it spreads that discipline across the whole team.
Full piece in Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/08/07/your-ai-is-learning-from-someone-make-sure-its-your-best-engineer/
I also open-sourced an experiment called Senior Engineering Partner, a Claude Code skill that encodes those habits into working instructions. Spec before code. Evidence before claims. Real failures turn into regression tests instead of postmortem notes. It's on GitHub if you want to try it or tear it apart.
https://github.com/bjgreenberg/senior-engineering-partner
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