AI made code cheap. Trust is not. The old review ritual still pretends a careful human can keep up by reading harder. Then a green test suite lies to you, a 32k-line PR asks for a blessing, and a professional-looking diff hides the real risk. Quality was never living in the scroll bar. The real question is why the system should trust the change at all when attention runs out.
Most teams treat OpenAPI as documentation. This experiment treats it as an executable contract. Every endpoint, every response, every error is validated against the spec automatically. This post explains the testing concept, the metadata system, and the CI pipeline behind it.
A year of challenges, mistakes, and growth. From leading a new framework team formed from four different teams, to people leaving, to finding our identity through an on-site workshop. This is my story of 2025 as an engineering lead at shopware AG, including the hard-learned lessons about team building, roadmap ownership, and what really matters in engineering leadership.
