2026-10-06 | AI-assisted engineering operating rule. Kiran wants AI to expand implementation capacity without becoming the authority. Canonical workflow: grill-with-docs -> to-spec -> Goldilocks review -> to-tickets -> implement -> code review, with TDD/vertical slices, explicit assumptions, no guessing ambiguous business rules, no silent catches, no bypassing checks, and unfinished work made visible. Cheaper/faster models can be implementation workers or bounded routing/classification layers, but architecture, compliance and acceptance need deterministic gates and independent review. Model changes should be benchmarked on the same closed O9X tasks, using accepted-ticket cost, human attention, review rework and escaped defects, and model/version aliases should be pinned or validated before upgrades.