AI coding assistants skip the design phase and jump straight to implementation, embedding invisible design decisions in generated code. This creates an 'Implementation Trap' where developers must reverse-engineer architecture, scope, and contracts from hundreds of lines of code simultaneously. A structured five-level conversation pattern — Capabilities, Components, Interactions, Contracts, Implementation — reconstructs the whiteboarding process that human pairs do naturally. No code is written until Level 5 is approved. A real-world notification service example shows how this caught an unnecessary abstraction over BullMQ at the Components level, and how agreed contracts enabled TDD before any implementation. The framework scales to task complexity and compounds with upfront knowledge priming about the project's tech stack and conventions.
