Where are the guardrails everyone promised for AI?

Julien Verlaguet, founder of SkipLabs, argues that most AI guardrail claims are just better prompting with no real infrastructure behind them. His product, Skipper, is a specialized coding agent for generating and maintaining backend services, built on a sound, incremental TypeScript implementation and a reactive runtime. Unlike general-purpose tools like Claude Code, Skipper focuses narrowly on backend service generation, claiming 90%+ test pass rates on its corpus vs. 20% for Claude Code. The underlying thesis is that as AI agents generate more code, developer tooling designed for human readability becomes a ceiling — and a new generation of machine-native, formally specified tools is needed. Verlaguet also predicts AI will push software toward stateful service architectures to enable faster iteration cycles. SkipLabs raised $8M in seed funding and is preparing a product announcement.