What your coding agent costs is an architecture problem, not a billing one
The expensive decisions are where work is routed and what context it carries — not how the prompt is worded.
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Five ways a coding agent fails, and every one of them exits zero
A named failure is preventable. "The AI messed up" is not.
163 checks reported green. None of them read the published page.
A verification that asserts on the surface you wrote to will agree with you every time.
Senior engineers decide without complete information. Here is the method
The skill is not better judgement. It is knowing which kind of door you are standing at.
MaterialTheme is three CompositionLocals and nothing else
MaterialTheme provides three CompositionLocals and a handful of defaults. Understanding its actual shape explains how components pick up styling, why hardcoded values break dark mode, and what a custom theme has to replace.
Most code review approves code. Here is review that improves it
Line-level comments are the least valuable thing in a review. Three questions outrank all of them.
I created three duplicate posts because the only record was a file I didn't read
When an API has no list endpoint, your local record is not a convenience. It is the only state there is.
SearchBar has two states, and the second one takes over the screen
Material 3's SearchBar transitions into a full-screen suggestion surface, which makes it a navigation concern. Chips come in four semantic variants, and the assist/filter/input/suggestion split matters.
Date pickers are a timezone bug with a calendar attached
Compose's date and time pickers are straightforward components hiding a genuine trap: the selected value is UTC-midnight epoch millis, and converting it naively shifts dates by one in most of the world.
The spinner you show for 200ms is worse than no spinner
Compose gives you progress indicators; it doesn't tell you when to show one. Duration decides: under 300ms show nothing, over a second show progress, and never let an indicator replace content that could be a skeleton.
A ceiling in a conditional is one someone deletes
A budget expressed as a value can be read, derived from and audited. Buried in a conditional it can only be obeyed or removed, and it gets removed.
A command that checks its own contract
A command's promises decay silently through ordinary edits. Per-command assertions plus a fixture that removes one guarantee is what makes the decay loud.