In complex systems, the enemy is not ignorance.
It’s cognitive overload.
That’s why checklists work. Not because engineers can’t think, but because thinking under pressure is expensive. Your working memory shrinks. You miss the obvious. You forget the one step that matters.
AI makes this better and worse at the same time.
Better, because it can surface options and remind you of steps you forgot.
Worse, because it can produce confident output that feels complete, even when it skipped the one check that would have caught the error.
So the move is not “trust the model more” or “ban the model.”
The move is: make correctness repeatable.
A lightweight checklist does that, especially for the moments that matter:
- Before you merge
- Before you ship
- Before you declare something “done”
Three questions to keep in mind
- What would prove this wrong?
- What did we assume without verifying?
- What’s the blast radius if we’re wrong?
Checklists aren’t bureaucracy.
They’re how you keep your standards intact when speed is tempting.