# Unreviewed AI code anti-pattern Filing pull requests containing AI-generated code you haven't personally verified is the most common anti-pattern in [[Agentic Engineering]]. It amounts to delegating your work to the code reviewer: they're the ones who now have to determine whether the code works, is correct, and meets quality standards. They could have used an agent themselves. The bar is simple: the code works, and you are confident that it works. That means you've run it, tested it, and reviewed it. Not just checked that CI is green. Mitigations: - **Run tests locally** before opening the PR - **Keep PRs small**: split large changes into multiple commits rather than one massive diff - **Provide context**: link issues, explain goals, reference specifications - **Show your work**: test notes, implementation comments, screenshots, or demo videos that demonstrate the feature works - **Review generated PR descriptions**: agents write plausible-sounding descriptions that may not reflect what the code actually does. Validate them This is a form of [[Cognitive debt]]: if you don't understand the code well enough to verify it, you've lost comprehension of your own system. The antidote is [[Agentic TDD]] (tests that objectively verify behavior) combined with actual code review. ## References - https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/anti-patterns/ ## Related - [[Agentic Engineering]] - [[Cognitive debt]] - [[Agentic TDD]] - [[Code is cheap, quality is not]] - [[Technical debt]] - [[Simon Willison]]