Design Contracts: Making AI-Generated Code Production-Safe

AI-generated code excels at producing locally functional implementations but often lacks awareness of production constraints and operational realities. Through building PooledMailKit, an SMTP connection pool library, the author demonstrates how explicit design contracts can teach AI systems about operational requirements like connection reuse, failure handling, and retry safety. This transforms AI code generation from syntactically correct but operationally naive implementations into production-ready solutions that handle real-world complexity.