Shopify built Helix to rebuild its apps with AI agents that must pass four gates. A video recreated it in Claude Code. What Shopify said, what changed, what the evidence shows.
The AI-native SDLC says where checks belong, not how to spot one that cannot fail. Nine cases from our own week, each with the measurement that caught it.
A status field that can only say pass or fail will lie by omission the moment the real answer is 'not computed yet.' Treating pending as blocked trains people to ignore both.
Say you give twenty autonomous agents write access to the same shared state. The bottleneck does not move to the model. It moves to whoever has to reconcile the collisions.
A safety gate that has never been triggered looks identical to one that is broken. The difference only shows up when you go looking for the trigger it should have caught.
Coverage, readiness alerts, and public proof are different jobs. A green scorecard that confuses them will celebrate the wrong win.
Agent loops are not failing because the models are weak. They are failing because nobody built the state, verifiers, gates, and receipts around them.