Software Engineering with Coding Agents

This advise and opinions are based on my experience. Yours may differ, but I hope you find it valuable nonetheless. Working with agents You will be tempted to throw one or two sentences at an agent and say "go!". That's what I'd call "ai slop". It may work if you don't care about what you're building, but at the very least; you should be deciding your requirements and taking the lead of the project. The outcome depends greatly on how rich (not big) the agent context is when it is working. What are we building? I have noticed that humans are lazy by nature. So why write that issue yourself when an agent can do it? Why write user-stories when the agent can do it? Why create wireframes when the agent can do it? Noticing a pattern here? Good. When I'm working on projects, I draw a line in the sand in terms of project ownership: We must have requirements to know what we're building. I've tried spec files, using issue-trackers and as soon as the humans stop writing these files they become…