How 41 codified laws, 22 specialist roles, and a file-based memory system stopped an autonomous coding agent from quietly re-breaking the same production defect every few weeks — and why I'm open-sourcing the whole thing as LEO.
Ten times faster, ten times more garbage
Developers reach for Cursor and Copilot to write code ten times faster, and the tools deliver on exactly that promise — which turns out to be most of the problem. Used as advanced autocomplete, an LLM doesn't produce ten times more good code. It produces legacy at ten times the usual rate. You ask for a feature; the model hands back a wall of if/else; you ship it. Two months later the codebase reads like it was assembled by five people who never spoke to each other, the test suite is red more often than green, and the senior engineers who never touched the tool get to point at the wreckage and say, "See? AI is just a toy."
They are not wrong about the wreckage. They are wrong about what caused it.
The bug that wasn't a bug
