“Two engineers, three months of code, and none of it worked.”

The situation

I built the system side of this product from the start: the mobile app, the .NET API, the database and the Azure setup. That side ran stable and on budget. The trouble was in the AI features. A PhD graduate specializing in AI built the AI features. After a month, he was let go because features were coming too slowly. A second engineer was hired to focus on the AI. Two weeks later, he asked me to review his code.

What I found

Nearly all of the code had been written by AI. Features didn’t work as needed and the logic failed, because neither AI engineer understood application architecture. The AI tools were producing code nobody could reason about.

What I did

• Rewrote 3 months’ worth of code in 4 weeks
• Spent a month training the AI engineer in application architecture and craftsmanship
• Wrote the team’s coding practices and conventions into the AI agents’ instruction files

The result

• 3 months of broken code replaced in 4 weeks
• An engineer trained to build properly
• Much of the product can now be built AI-first, with AI agents following the right standards