The Hard Part of AI Coding Is the Second Change

Brian Woods argues that AI agents make producing a working first change cheap, but accepting subsequent changes requires preserving what must stay true—such as no duplicate payments or cross-tenant data leaks—through specification, validation, provenance and authorization. He describes a synthetic experiment against Uncle's verifier where a signed record of a build with failed tests and audit returned VERIFIED, showing that attestation validity and release readiness are separate questions. He proposes a design in which each accepted change is attested by a trusted workflow, linked to prior attestations in a DAG, and verified by walking the graph, while noting the approach cannot prove tests were sufficient or the software correct.