The commit message was the whole instrument panel
I asked an agent to diagnose a failing pipeline and leave it broken. It fixed it, then wrote a commit message about something it hadn't done, which bothered me a lot more than the fix.
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26 pages
Agents
My best finding came from the model I trust least
I sent a research agent off to back up something I'd been saying out loud for weeks. It handed me the evidence against it instead, and it wasn't the first time that model had done it to me.
I blamed the agents for my rate limit
Twenty agent sessions, one GitLab account on the Free plan and a rate limit that kept tripping. The swarm was the obvious suspect, right up until I traced it.
Nothing in the room can take it personally
Reviewers in a group agree more than they should, and I don't think it's anybody's fault. So I've started building review panels out of things that have never been in a room.
Fourteen projects, one head
Agents made the doing cheap. What fourteen sessions cost is walking into each one cold, and the one head doing the walking.
What happens when an AI burns out
A Claude session ran for two days, stopped listening and got my hand-written code backwards. So I took it off the job, and asked for a proper handover first.
Prove the bug before you fix it
A model handed a bug will hand you back a plausible fix and a green test suite in about a minute. That tells you almost nothing.
A terrible lead to an AI junior
I'd built this exact thing by hand, years ago, pixel perfect. So why was I sitting here shouting at a screen while a machine got it wrong three times?
Fifty-four tools before a word was typed
go/mcp puts a Go CLI, HTTP service or gRPC service on the Model Context Protocol with three discovery tools instead of one per command, so a model carries a lantern rather than the whole catalogue.
Check the code you're reading is current
I was a minute from filing a fix for a feature that had shipped the day before. The reason I had not noticed turned out to be a rule of my own, doing precisely what I told it to.
