Over the last year, I’ve reviewed about a dozen projects where AI was used heavily in development. These were real products with real users, built fast and shipped to production.
Most worked fine. Some had interesting patterns that kept showing up across different codebases. These aren’t unique to any one team or project, they’re just common things that happen when AI writes code and humans skip the review step.
Here’s what I noticed: AI is exceptional at writing code quickly. It’s less aware of context, performance implications, and long-term maintainability. That’s not a criticism of AI, it’s just what it is right now.
Below are some patterns I saw repeatedly. Some affected user experience. Some created performance issues. Some were just things that made maintenance harder.
If you’re using AI to build (like I am), this might be useful. Every pattern here is avoidable once you know what to look for.
