The Dependency Firewall: Isolate AI Changes So...

One bad AI-generated change shouldn't cascade through your entire codebase. But without guardrails, that's exactly what happens. I call this the Dependency Firewall — a pattern borrowed from SRE blast-radius thinking, applied to AI-assisted coding. The Problem You ask your AI assistant to refactor a utility function. It "helpfully" updates the function signature, changes the return type, and touches three callers. Your tests pass locally — but a downstream service that imports that module breaks