Your AI Rollout Didn't Create Inconsistency. It Revealed It.

The PRs were bigger. Review times were flat. And somewhere in week six of the rollout, I started noticing the same problem solved three different ways across three different services. Try/catch blocks blanketing everything in one service. A custom logging wrapper nobody else knew existed in another. Home-built retry logic in a third that duplicated what was sitting two directories over. All technically valid. All completely inconsistent. All generated, at least in part, by the same AI tools we had just given the team. My first instinct was to fix the AI. I started thinking about guardrails in Cursor. Tighter prompt guidelines. Review checkpoints before AI-generated code could make it into a PR. We had rolled the tools out without enough constraints, and the codebase was showing it. That felt like a clean diagnosis. The kind where the fix is scoped and technical and doesn't require any uncomfortable conversations. Then I pulled up the git history. The inconsistency predated our AI rollo