Until last November, I used assistant-style workflows, co-writing everything. Then at the beginning of this year, I started using agentic coding tools for small PR-style tasks, but I still reviewed every line and changed if necessary.
Over the past few weeks, I experimented for the first time with developing with agentic coding without writing or reviewing any code, essentially running in fully autonomous mode without asking approvals, and see what happens.
Here is what I have learned so far.
- Spec: Instead of firing off a task with a short prompt, discuss and co-write a detailed spec with a to-do list. This forced me to think through edge cases beforehand and come up with clearer instruction for model and better design. The spec.md also served as a nice handoff instruction when I needed to switch models.
- Unit tests: I had a model generate unit tests for every feature including GUI and automatically run the full test suite after each revision. This allowed to automate faster and produce more reliable code with minimum breakage. I also kept a few "absolute golden" tests that agents are not allowed to modify in any circumstance, and every revision had to pass the tests.
- Backup: I had a model automatically commit revision so I can always start clean and roll back if needed.
I mean these are already good ideas in general, but once I explicitly included these in the default instructions, things went significantly smoother and faster! Especially incorporating the unit tests into the workflow dramatically sped up the process.
What other advice do you guys have for successful agentic coding in fully autonomous (AKA YOLO) mode?
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