Not quite, because the architecture often needs to evolve when you learn more as the project evolves. People will complain when they feel the constraints drive them to unnatural workarounds, the agents don't.
You can try telling the agent to stop and ask when a constraint proves problematic, except it doesn't have as good a judgment as humans to know when that's the case. I often find myself saying, "why did you write that insane code instead of raising the alarm about a problem?" and the answer is always, "you're absolutely right; I continued when I should have stopped." Of course, you can only tell when that happens if you carefully review the code.
So I run a solo saas that supports my family, and so the stakes feel very high for me. I use AI heavily, and I’ve seen the exact problem you’re describing. I feel like I’m often really riding the edge in terms of trying to use AI to accelerate product development while not letting tech debt accumulate too fast, or let my mental model of the codebase slip too much.
Here’s what’s working for me right now:
1. The basics: use best model available, have skills and rules that specify project guidelines, etc.
2. Always use plan mode. It works much better to iterate on the concept of what we’re going to do, then do the implementation. The models will adhere to the plan at very high rates in my experience.
3. Don’t give chunks of work that are too large in scope. This is just art, and I’m constantly experimenting with how ambitious I can be.
4. I review all code to some extent, but I have a strong mental model of what areas of the app are more critical, where hidden bugs might accumulate, etc, and I review both tests and impl more strenuously in those areas. Whereas like a widget for my admin panel probably gets a 2 second glance.
5. Have the discipline to go through periodically and clean up tech debt, refactor things that you’d do differently now, etc. I find the AI a huge help here, because I can clean up cruft in an hour that would have once taken me days, and thus probably wouldn’t have gotten done.
6. I’m experimenting with shifting my architecture to make it easier to review AI code, make it less likely it’ll make mistakes, etc. Honestly mostly things I should have always been doing, but the level of formalism and abstraction on my solo projects is usually different than on a bigger team.
To each their own, but I’ve grown this from nothing to about $350k in ARR over the last ten months, and I’m very confident I never could have built this product without AI help in triple that time.
You can try telling the agent to stop and ask when a constraint proves problematic, except it doesn't have as good a judgment as humans to know when that's the case. I often find myself saying, "why did you write that insane code instead of raising the alarm about a problem?" and the answer is always, "you're absolutely right; I continued when I should have stopped." Of course, you can only tell when that happens if you carefully review the code.