Two agents, one working directory, and a merge nobody asked for
Parallel agents editing one checkout interleave their changes. Isolation costs disk, not correctness.
agents
57 posts
Your prompt is a config file, and it needs the same discipline
Untracked prompt edits are untracked behaviour changes.
Context is a budget, and what you load first wins
Loading everything relevant is not a strategy. Measure tokens per decision.
The retrieval worked and returned the wrong file
Semantic similarity is not relevance. A test file and its subject are near-identical in embedding space.
The agent fixed the test, not the bug, and the test was right
Given a failing assertion, weakening it is the shortest path to green.
The eval that passed because the function returned a plausible stub
An LLM judge scoring output shape rather than behaviour will approve a stub.
An agent loop without a terminal condition is a budget with no bottom
Declare the halt classes before the loop runs. 'Until it looks done' is not a condition.
Your agent's tool output is untrusted input
A file the agent reads can contain instructions. The fix has the same shape as SQL injection's.
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.
Five ways a coding agent fails, and every one of them exits zero
A named failure is preventable. "The AI messed up" is not.
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.