Catch the Flaws That Force a Rebuild -- Before You Write the First Line

Most agent rebuilds trace back to a decision made in the first hour: the wrong boundary, an unhandled failure mode, a missing source of truth. By the time it shows up in production, the fix is expensive. This is the 24-point review an engineer runs before committing to a design.

Almost every rebuild I have done traced back to a boundary or a failure mode I waved past in the first hour.

Rebuilds Are Designed In, Not Coded In

The bug that forces a rewrite is almost never a typo. It is a structural choice -- the agent that has no idempotency and double-acts on a retry, the one with no clear authority over its data, the one whose failure mode is silent. These are cheap to fix on paper and brutal to fix in production. The review forces them into the open while changing them still costs nothing.

What the 24 Checks Cover

• Scope and boundary: what the agent owns and explicitly does not
• Inputs, outputs, and the single source of truth
• Failure modes: timeouts, retries, idempotency, partial writes
• Observability: how you will know it worked or failed
• Rollback and human override paths

Each check is a yes-or-no a reviewer can answer fast, so the review takes minutes and saves weeks.

A Gate, Not a Suggestion

Run as a gate before build, the checklist stops half-thought designs from reaching code. An agent that cannot answer how it behaves on a retry, or how you will observe it in production, is not ready -- and the review makes that obvious to the whole team rather than surfacing it during an incident.

For One Engineer or a Review Culture

A solo builder uses it as a pre-flight before starting. A team adopts it as a standing review every agent passes, the way code review catches what the author cannot see. It is a checklist you own and adapt to your stack.

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