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To spend less time prompting, approving, and checking coding agents, treat them as one part of an engineering workflow—not as autonomous teammates you can trust without safeguards. Define work in a testable specification, isolate each task, block progress on quality checks, use a separate reviewer, and make unattended runs visible and stoppable.
Why coding agents need a workflow around them
“Coding agents are good at writing code and bad at deciding what to write,” writes software engineer Aman Tahiliani. The distinction explains much of the babysitting: an agent may produce code quickly while still misunderstanding the request, changing the wrong files, or failing to notice that its work is incomplete.
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Tahiliani describes a pipeline that treats agents like contractors: a specification, an isolated workspace, a build gate before a pull request, and review by an agent other than the one that wrote the code. He says two human gates remain, with the work between them unattended. This is one practitioner’s description, not an independently audited evaluation or proof that the approach works for every codebase.
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Make the request checkable before implementation starts
A task description should give the agent less room to guess and give a reviewer a clear way to judge the result. Before handing over work, write down:
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- Outcome: what should change from the user’s or system’s perspective.
- Scope: which components, files, or behaviors are in bounds, and what should remain untouched.
- Acceptance checks: observable conditions that determine whether the task is complete, including relevant tests or build commands.
- Constraints: compatibility, security, performance, or design requirements the implementation must preserve.
- Uncertainty: what the agent should ask about rather than assume.
For example, “improve the settings page” leaves success open to interpretation. A more useful task names the behavior to change, the affected area, the conditions that must still hold, and the test that will demonstrate the result. The aim is not to dictate every line of code; it is to make the desired outcome and its boundaries legible.
Reduce the blast radius with isolated workspaces
Agents can collide with each other or with a developer’s in-progress edits if they share a working tree. Tahiliani’s account describes using isolated workspaces for multi-repository work. The practical principle is to give each task a bounded place to work, keep changes attributable, and make it straightforward to discard or inspect a failed attempt.
Isolation does not make a change correct. It makes mistakes easier to contain and parallel work less likely to overwrite another task. The workspace should also make the relevant repository context available; a task spanning repositories needs clear ownership of which changes belong where.
Turn quality checks into gates, not suggestions
A test instruction in a prompt is not the same as a test that blocks delivery. In Tahiliani’s described workflow, a build gate must pass before work earns a pull request. He also reports a browser-test gate in one project. Those are implementation details from his account, not evidence of a universal improvement rate.
Place checks at the point where they can prevent a bad transition: before a change is proposed, merged, or deployed, as appropriate for the repository. Use the project’s real validation commands and define what happens when they fail. A useful gate reports failure clearly and returns the task for correction or human attention instead of silently allowing the workflow to continue.
Automated checks can catch only what they cover. A passing build does not establish that a feature meets its acceptance criteria, and a browser test cannot substitute for every security, data, or design review. Keep each check tied to the specific risk it is meant to reduce.
Separate implementation from review
Tahiliani says the reviewer in his pipeline is never the agent that wrote the code. That separation creates a distinct review pass rather than asking the implementation agent to certify its own work. It does not establish how accurate the reviewer is, so the review still needs clear criteria and a human decision where the consequences warrant one.
Review for more than whether the code compiles. Compare the change with the task’s acceptance checks; inspect scope and unintended edits; and examine relevant edge cases, tests, and security-sensitive behavior. The reviewer should report concrete findings, not merely approve because a build passed.
Make unattended work observable and bounded
Sam French describes a queue-based setup in which tasks are submitted, runners pick them up, task state changes as code is fetched and an agent runs, commits are pushed when present, and completion or failure is recorded and emailed. He also describes exponential backoff, capped cooldowns, and an alert after repeated failures. This is one person’s system and experience, not evidence that unattended coding is safe for every task or repository.
The operational lesson is that “unattended” should mean no need to watch each step—not invisible or unlimited. A robust queue should let a human see:
- which tasks are waiting, running, completed, or failed;
- whether a run produced and pushed a commit;
- what checks passed or failed and where the run stopped;
- how retries and cooldowns are progressing; and
- when repeated failures have stopped automatic attempts and need intervention.
French calls the retry lesson “Backoff or burn.” His account illustrates why retries need bounds: he reports 47 failed re-queues in four minutes after a repository was misconfigured, and says his system alerts after five consecutive failures. Those figures describe his incident and configuration, not recommended defaults for every system. Retrying a deterministic configuration error without a stopping rule only multiplies noise and cost.
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Not every task deserves the same degree of autonomy. Routine, reversible changes with clear acceptance checks may be suitable for a queue. Work that can affect sensitive data, permissions, production behavior, or difficult-to-reverse migrations should retain an explicit human decision at the relevant boundary.
Before leaving a task unattended, ask whether its scope is narrow, the workspace isolated, checks meaningful, review independent, and failure visible. Also decide in advance when the system should stop—such as repeated check failures, missing task context, or a change outside the allowed scope. The design goal is not to eliminate oversight; it is to spend human attention on decisions and exceptions rather than on every intermediate prompt.
A practical handoff checklist
- Specify the outcome. State the intended behavior, scope, constraints, and acceptance checks.
- Assign an isolated workspace. Keep the task’s edits separate from unrelated work and other agents.
- Run required gates. Make the relevant build and tests block progression when they fail.
- Request independent review. Have a different reviewer inspect the change against the specification.
- Expose state and evidence. Record status, commits, check results, and failures in a place the human can inspect.
- Bound retries and authority. Use backoff, a stopping condition, and human approval where the task’s consequences call for it.
These practices are workflow controls, not a promise that an agent will be reliable. Their value is that they make task intent, errors, and responsibility clearer—and reduce the need to supervise every step by hand.
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