Golden path

The idea predates AI: platform teams pave a road for the common case (create a service, ship to prod) so most work flows down it, while leaving the road open for teams with a real reason to go elsewhere. It is a paved road, not a fence.

Applied to AI coding, the golden path is the shared setup that makes good agent use the default: a library of slash commands and agent definitions, templates that encode your conventions, MCP access to internal systems, and review hooks that catch what agents typically get wrong.

It matters because without one, the productivity does not compound. Every engineer discovers their own workflow, the learning evaporates instead of accumulating, and quality varies by whoever happened to be at the keyboard.