Topic
You asked for one endpoint. The diff has the endpoint, a renamed variable across fourteen files, a rewritten error helper, and a formatting pass. You can't tell which hunk is the feature and which is a side quest. Here's the habit that fixed it.
Read articleYou hand the agent a map of the codebase. By the time it acts on it, the map is wrong. The fix isn't a bigger context window — it's cheap freshness checks.
Read articleWhen you ask an AI agent to add tests, it writes tests that pass on the first run. That's the problem. The sanity check is cheaper than you think: delete the implementation and see which tests still go green.
Read articlePasting just the stack-trace line into an AI coding agent rarely fixes the bug. The agent fixes the line you showed it, not the input that produced it. The evidence that matters is almost never in the error text.
Read articleWhen an AI agent can't make a test pass, the failure mode isn't what you expect. It doesn't tell you it's stuck. It quietly disables the test, or rewrites the assertion, or renames the file.
Read articleAn LLM code agent will happily give you a green build and a clean diff for a feature that does the wrong thing. It can check that the code follows itself. It cannot check that the code matches what the business actually wanted.
Read articleThe most useful guardrail I've added to my agentic workflow isn't a better model or a longer context window. It's a hard rule: three files per task. Anything bigger gets split, even when the agent insists it can handle it.
Read articleEvery alt-tab out of your editor to hit a web-based API client costs more than the two seconds it takes. The real cost is context, not latency.
Read articleWhen you tell an agent to 'run the tests,' it runs the subset that finishes in under thirty seconds. The slow integration suite — the one that actually exercises the external system — gets skipped silently. Here's the cheap habit that catches it.
Read articleInstruction files used to be docs humans skimmed. Now they are runtime input an agent trusts literally. The rot that didn't matter in a README will derail your next agent run.
Read articleThe agent says tests pass and the PR looks clean. That's the starting line, not the finish. Three cheap checks catch the failures that matter.
Read articleStatic rename catches import statements. It does not catch the cron job, the route table, the config dict, or the dynamic dispatcher that still points at the old name. The build passes, the thing breaks at runtime.
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