The Echo Chamber in Your Pipeline

This is Part 1 of a four-part series, "The Specification as Quality Gate." The series develops three hypotheses about executable specifications, AI code review, and what each is actually for. Parts 2, 3, and 4 will follow. When an AI coding agent generates code and a separate AI reviewer examines it, both agents are reasoning from the same artefact: the code itself. If neither has an external reference (a specification, a contract, a statement of what the system is supposed to do), the reviewer has no ground truth to compare against. It checks the code against the code. Not against intent.