AI-Assisted Engineering Leadership Checklist (2026)

Use this as a weekly operating checklist for EMs, tech leads, and platform/security partners. The goal is simple: make it easy to ship, and hard to ship nonsense.

1) Intake and Specs (before work starts)
- Every ticket has testable acceptance criteria. If it can’t be validated, it doesn’t enter the sprint.
- Every ticket lists explicit non-goals (what will not be solved now).
- Every ticket includes a validation plan: which test, metric, log, or user behavior proves success.
- Every ticket touching auth, payments, PII, or infra states the boundary it changes.

2) AI Tool Use Policy (keep it short, enforceable)
- Define what data is prohibited in prompts (secrets, tokens, private keys, customer PII, unreleased financials).
- Define approved tools and where they may be used (IDE assistant vs browser chat vs internal gateway).
- Require human ownership of generated code: “If you can’t explain it, you can’t merge it.”

3) Code Review Requirements (assume some code is ‘third-party’)
- Critical paths have CODEOWNERS (auth, payments, infra, security-sensitive services).
- PRs must explain: intent, risk, and rollback in plain language.
- Reviewers must check invariants: error handling, permission boundaries, data flow, retries/timeouts.

4) Test Evidence (make the machine prove it)
- At least one negative test exists (proves it fails when it should).
- At least one boundary test exists (null/empty/max/min/out-of-range).
- Tests do not merely mirror the implementation; they assert behavior.

5) Operational Proof (production is part of the definition of done)
- Add at least one observability signal for the change (log/metric/trace).
- Define an alert condition for serious regressions (even if it’s a temporary dashboard + on-call runbook).
- Confirm rollback works (feature flag, config switch, or deployment rollback procedure).

6) Decision Log (institutional memory you can audit)
- Record the decision in one sentence.
- Record the owner (single accountable person).
- Record why (2–5 bullets, with links).
- Record reversibility and rollback.
- Record what evidence will validate the decision.

Weekly leadership prompt:
- Look at the last five merged PRs in a core repo. Did they include intent, risk, rollback, and validation? If not, tighten the merge gate.
- Look at the last incident. Name the missing constraint (spec, test, review ownership, or observability) and implement it this week.