Working with Coding Agents
A short list of working habits, each with the failure it prevents.
Commit before you start
A commit behind you turns “undo the last twenty minutes” from archaeology into one command.
One task at a time
A request with three parts produces a diff with three unrelated stories in it, and a review that misses one.
Before sending: can you say in one sentence what would make this attempt a success? If not, it is still a topic.
Make it show the output
“It should work now” is not a result. Run the tests, run the program, look at what came back.
Be sceptical of a test written in the same turn as the fix: it can be shaped to pass rather than to check.