The moment I let my guard down, my AI agent started burning through my wallet. I stepped away for a brief moment to grab a coffee, and it got stuck in an infinite loop, trying to fix a bug with the same failing approach over and over for 30 minutes. By the time I checked back, it had chewed through $10 in tokens.

That moment made me realize, AI agents lack the "Struggle Equity" that senior developers carry.

We have a "gut feeling" for architectural risks such as race conditions, retry storms, consistency failures, learned through years of painful experience. But these patterns don't always surface when we're context switching or delegating to AI.

Dev Sentinel is my attempt to externalize this intuition.

Instead of just documenting knowledge, it treats failure patterns as triggers. When the agent is about to walk into a trap I've fallen into before, Dev Sentinel signals a reminder. Crucially, it evolves these isolated moments of frustration into generalized patterns, turning subjective struggle into reusable architectural intuition.

It’s an experiment: Can we turn our intuition into automated architectural guardrails?

Dev Sentinel is my attempt to externalize this intuition.

I’m looking for feedback from others who have tried to formalize their "gut feelings" into code. Does this resonate with your workflow, or is there a better way to offload "Struggle Equity" to AI agents?

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