Pick ten commits from a team using AI heavily and you can usually tell which developer prompted which one. Same codebase, ten dialects. That’s new, and it’s a direct result of how AI writes code.
The old way to keep standards worked because humans were slow
A linter, code review, and a style guide someone wrote two years ago. That was enough, because people learned the conventions over time and the volume was human-sized. New patterns spread by osmosis. Review caught the rest.
AI broke the assumption underneath it
Every AI session starts cold. It doesn’t remember your conventions, your folder structure, or the argument you had about error handling last spring. It reflects whoever is prompting it and how well they framed the request that day. Multiply that across a team and consistency stops being a default and starts being a coincidence.
Rules files help, then drift
CLAUDE.md, cursor rules, and their cousins are a real improvement. But they drift out of date, they differ from repo to repo and person to person, and nothing forces anyone to follow them. A rule that isn’t enforced is a suggestion, and AI is very good at politely ignoring suggestions.
Consistency has to be a gate, not a hope
If you want standards to hold, they have to apply the same way in every session, whatever tool the developer is using, and they have to fail the work when they’re violated. Anything softer pushes the problem into code review, at AI speed, which is exactly the thing that doesn’t scale.
What good looks like
You set your standards once, at the team level. Every session inherits them automatically. Enforcement doesn’t depend on a reviewer remembering to check, and a new developer writes code the way your team writes code on their first day, not their fiftieth.
Where FlyDocs fits
FlyDocs turns your standards into gates that every AI session inherits, across Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and the rest. Set them once, and consistency stops riding on how each person prompts.