I wanted to disagree with 'AI made me a worse reviewer' from Michael Amachree (@dev_michael) . Instead I counted 204 of my own guards — and 89 % of them have never been asked to prove they can fail.
Michael wrote something that I couldn't put down: AI didn't make me a worse coder, it made me a worse reviewer. Here is the number, and it's worse than his thesis: of the 204 automated checks in my repositories that draw a conclusion, only 22 can prove they are able to fail. That's 11 %. The other 89 % have never once been shown a known-bad input. They are green. Whether they are green because everything is fine, or green because they are incapable of finding anything - I could not have told you last week. And I'm the person who wrote them.
What I actually counted
First the definition, so you can reject it or reuse it.
A conclusion-bearing guard is any test that reads source code, config, or system state and asserts a claim about it. Not "does this function return 4" - but "no workflow downloads its cache over the network", "every page passes the same quarter filter", "this feature flag matches the deployed spec". The tests that stand in for a human reviewer.
