Why Your AI Coding Agent Needs a Digital Straitjacket

We are giving AI coding agents way too much freedom. What they actually need is a digital straitjacket. My north star in software development has always been simple: create actual value. Make things that make people's lives easier—or as Jonathan Smart perfectly puts it: Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH). But for 20 years, I’ve watched the industry actively fight this. I started in the waterfall factory floors of the dot-com bubble. Later, as a Scrum PO and agency owner, I fought fake agile and HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person's Opinion). When consulting in critical national infrastructure, I had to drag teams kicking and screaming into modern DevOps. The core issue is always human: we know the right practices, but when deadlines loom, we drop the theories and take shortcuts. For a long time, I dreamed of building a SaaS platform—a UI to force teams to actually follow product frameworks. But as generative AI evolved, I realized that building AI middleware was a dead end. The real pow