Stage 1 — Foundational limits

The starting point: what AI can do out of the box, before any of your work shapes it.

  • Understands textbook patterns but not your team's standards
  • Trained on mixed-quality code and documentation
  • Biased toward mainstream vendors and common approaches
  • Missing the "when textbook doesn't apply" intuition
Human review altitude: Every output. Every keystroke.
Humans stay in the loop throughout. The altitude of their review rises as the agent's reliability does.