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317 posts · showing 181–190
2026
10 posts-
What an Agent-Run Sprint Actually Looks Like
Not the same sprint faster — an inversion. Most of the week becomes specifying and reviewing, review becomes the constraint, and integration becomes the new time sink.
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Code Review When Most Code Is Agent-Written
Review practices assumed an author who had reasons, understood the system, and made idiosyncratic mistakes. Agent output breaks all three — and the bugs that survive are the ones that look correct.
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The Deploy Step Nobody Should Automate Yet
It's the easiest step to automate, saves the least time, and carries the largest tail risk. Automate the readiness report and the rollback instead — and separate deploying from releasing.
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Autonomous Refactors: What Makes One Safe Enough to Merge
Refactoring is what agents do best and what most easily produces an unreviewable disaster — for the same reason. One property separates the two, and it isn't how hard the change looks.
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Requirements Are the Bottleneck an SDLC Agent Can't Remove
Compress implementation to nothing and delivery barely moves, because implementation was never the long row in the table. The constraint is upstream, it's organizational, and no tooling touches it.
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The Handoff That Breaks Every Autonomous SDLC Pipeline
Chain agents across the lifecycle and the first handoff fails hardest — because it's the only one whose input isn't a written artifact, and every downstream check verifies against its output rather than the intent.
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Agents Are Better at Writing Code Than at Deciding What to Build
Both feel like thinking about the problem, and only one has complete inputs and a checkable answer. The reframe that makes a model genuinely useful near a decision it shouldn't be making.
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The Ticket-to-PR Agent: Which Half of the Job It Does Well
The split wasn't by difficulty — some intricate tickets went fine and some trivial ones went badly. One question predicts it, and acting on it improves something other than your agent.
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What "End-to-End Development Agent" Actually Means Right Now
The phrase covers demos that differ by orders of magnitude. Naming the eight stages shows which two are genuinely autonomous — and why chaining them is qualitatively harder than any one of them.
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What Employers Pay For When Code Itself Is Cheap
Companies were never buying code exactly, but code was a big enough share that the distinction rarely mattered. Five things remain when it's cheap — and the proxies that used to demonstrate them stop working.