Ungoverned by Default

Your AI is making you average · Columbus AI Week · 10 September 2026 · Liz Rettig, Lil Agile Monster

In the room: the rule, and the level it is on today. Everything shaded is homework, and it is the part that does the work.

The rule What your AI actually said Level now Level needed
1. Written down   Five rules your organization follows to get work out the door. Stuck? How you size a piece of work, how you decide something is finished, how you tell leadership when it will land.
2. Nobody wrote it down   Three things a new hire learns in their first month that are not written anywhere. The thing somebody leans over and tells you, after you have already made the mistake once.

Levels: 0 nowhere at all, everybody just knows it · 1 told to the agent in a conversation · 2 written in a document · 3 the instructions every session loads · 4 in the path of the work, where it stops you. Most rules are fine where they are. Only a few earn a wall.

Then compare. Everywhere what your AI said disagrees with what you wrote is a standard you are handing over, and you never decided to. Everything under Nobody wrote it down it never had in the first place. Those are candidates, not answers.
Then decide which ones matter. A gap earns a wall if the common way is actively wrong for you rather than just different, if the drift stays invisible until it ships, and if it reaches somebody outside your team. Two of those three is the bar. Everything else stays advice, and advice is fine for the things that do not matter very much.
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