The Engineering of Intent, Chapter 26: Checklists for the Working Engineer

This is Part 26 of a series walking through my book The Engineering of Intent. In the previous chapter, we flipped through the debugging playbook. Chapter 26 is the shortest chapter in the book — six one-page checklists I actually reach for mid-task.

Checklists Are Not a Sign of Weakness

Print them. Keep them near your desk. Use them. Checklists are the mark of engineers who have learned that memory is unreliable under pressure.

The Six Checklists

1. Pre-Flight: New Feature. Eight items, from “one-sentence statement of what this feature is and is not” through “do I know what ‘done’ looks like beyond just tests pass.”
2. Pre-Flight: PR. Run the gate stack locally and read the output. Run the Consistency-Check prompt. Run the Adversarial Review prompt on your own diff. Update the Specs. Plan the rollback.
3. Pre-Flight: Production Deploy. Feature flag defaulted off. Rollback plan working in under five minutes. Regression metrics identified. On-call notified. “Am I alert?” (Deploys at 6 PM on Friday are a known anti-pattern.)
4. Post-Incident. Prose write-up within 24 hours. Root cause, not symptom. Regression test. Convention rule if a class was revealed. Blameless share. Follow-up a week later.
5. Context Pack Health (weekly). Accuracy, currency, size-budget compliance, representativeness of examples, the onboarding test — would a new engineer reading this produce a correct change?
6. Interview: AI-Native Engineer. Published projects. Written plans. Debugging transcripts. Crisp Context Packs. Judgment on when to supervise vs. hand off. A lessons file. At least one story of an agent-generated bug they caught.

“Checklists don’t slow you down. They slow down the version of you that was about to make an expensive mistake. That version of you doesn’t know which version it is. The checklist does.”

Next up — Chapter 27: Anti-Patterns — What Not to Do. If the checklists describe what to do, Chapter 27 is the long catalog of the twenty-five ways teams get this wrong in practice — the tempting shortcuts that look like speed and cost you the quarter.