Guardrails for shipping with AI agents, feat. Luca Rossi of Refactoring.fm
Code review has always been a time sink. AI just makes the dysfunction undeniable.
Luca Rossi, founder of Refactoring.fm and builder of the open source tool Tolaria, has been running one of engineering's most-read newsletters for five years, with over 170,000 subscribers. He's also been doing what a lot of engineering leaders talk about but rarely do: building a real product with AI agents to pressure-test what's actually possible today.
In this conversation, Rob and Luca dig into the state of AI adoption at the midpoint of 2026; what high-performing teams are getting right, why most orgs are still just bolting AI onto a broken process, and why code review was already a questionable practice before AI came along. Luca also walks through the "guides, gates, and guards" framework he uses to keep AI agents productive and honest on Tolaria: the instructions that steer agent behavior, the deterministic hooks that catch what agents ignore, and the nightly reflection loops that catch the rest.
Luca is the founder of Refactoring.fm, a newsletter and community covering software engineering and engineering leadership. He spent a decade as a CTO and startup founder before going independent, and now builds in public as both a writer and a solo product builder.
In this episode:
- Why adopting AI without fixing your process just means moving faster in the wrong direction
- What the most mature engineering teams are doing differently in 2026
- The guides, gates, and guards framework for AI-assisted development
- Why Luca has been a code review skeptic since before the AI era
- How building Tolaria became a way to get ground truth about what AI agents can actually do
- The unexpected differences between running a startup and running an independent content business
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