Backpressure is all you need

There are two *obvious* ways to use coding agents. Both are bad. The first is to let the LLM run unattended and hope the repository survives. This is fast, exciting, and stupid. It leads to bugs, confused changes, and a flood of PRs that humans cannot review quickly enough, at least not without eventually lowering their standards and merging things they do not really understand. The second approach is to treat the agent like glorified autocomplete and force a human to review every tiny step. This is safer, but slow enough to partially defeat the purpose of using an agent in the first place. If you still have to steer every minor decision, you have not delegated much. In this post, I’ll cover a third, not-so-obvious approach: building ways for the agent to validate more of its own work before a human has to step in. The goal to make longer unattended sessions safe enough to be useful without fully removing the human from the loop. It should also reduce the number of low-quality PRs…