ALL-CAPS Driven Development: shouting at AI does not work

Here is an example of ALL-CAPS Driven Development:

DAMN IT CLAUDE, DO NOT IMPORT ANYTHING FROM THIS LAYER INTO THAT ONE !!!

Beyond the risk of being rude and blunt with it (at a time when Geoffrey Hinton himself judges a 10% probability that AI wipes out humanity to be “not unreasonable”…), it is not very effective.

Why?

Because an import rule between layers can be checked in a deterministic, computational way.

For example with dependency-cruiser or eslint-plugin-boundaries in the TypeScript world.

Everything that can be checked without AI should be checked without AI

And there is one simple rule, far too often forgotten today: EVERYTHING that can be checked without AI should be checked without AI.

It is faster, cheaper, and it might add a few years to your life expectancy.

A rule set in a tool like dependency-cruiser or eslint-plugin-boundaries cannot be forgotten, bypassed out of fatigue, or misread. That is exactly the difference between an intention and a constraint: written out in a prompt, the rule stays a pious wish; set in CI, it becomes impossible to cross.

ALL-CAPS Driven Development is also often a symptom of a project that tried to go fast from day one, without building its harness. Slowing down at the start to build up that tooling is what keeps you from ending up there.

That harness is what I build with the teams I support.