I Use AI on My Codebase Every Day. Here's What I've Stopped Trusting It With.

There's a popular narrative right now: let AI handle your code, review the output, ship faster. I bought into it. I still use AI for coding every single day. But after months of daily use, I've developed a very specific list of things I will and won't let AI touch. Not from theory — from watching things break. What AI is genuinely great at Boilerplate. CRUD endpoints, validation schemas, form wiring, data transformation layers. AI handles repetition without getting bored or introducing typos. What used to take 30 minutes of mechanical typing now takes 3 minutes of review. Refactoring with clear instructions. "Separate business logic from the transport layer" — give AI a well-scoped structural task and it produces directionally correct results. Not perfect, but a solid starting point that saves real time. Test scaffolding. Happy path tests, edge case templates, baseline coverage expansion. AI can generate 20 test cases in the time it takes me to write 3. The catch is that I still need t