This post is full of things opposite of what I've found. An agent (claude code at least) will certainly refactor feature flags better than I ever could and is less likely to miss special cases. What the agent struggles with is business knowledge - context I hold in my head as a human communicating with other humans and working on a codebase over a long period of time.
Interesting. When it comes to auditing, I think there is also another layer to be verified - the intent. We have tooling for static analysis and automated tests, but drift in intent or vision is hard to detect.
After leaving agents unsupervised for longer periods of time, the biggest questions tend to be "how did it arrive at this conclusion?" and "did we drift from the initial vision?". Typically these questions are hard to answer as you only review the final state of the workflow.
I recently built an issue tracker that does offer time-traveling as a core feature. Somewhat unexpectedly this turned out to provide a much sought for overview allowing for a better workflow audit, as detailed here:
https://dev.to/ljtn/vision-drift-addressing-the-next-problem...
Would be interested to hear your thoughts. I guess vision drift would classify as something that is hard to reverse, because you often don't realize it has happened until much later.
There are so many other factors. Will people be pissed if they expected your output and got AI slop instead? Will you lose context on something that you really need to understand?
After leaving agents unsupervised for longer periods of time, the biggest questions tend to be "how did it arrive at this conclusion?" and "did we drift from the initial vision?". Typically these questions are hard to answer as you only review the final state of the workflow.
I recently built an issue tracker that does offer time-traveling as a core feature. Somewhat unexpectedly this turned out to provide a much sought for overview allowing for a better workflow audit, as detailed here: https://dev.to/ljtn/vision-drift-addressing-the-next-problem...
Would be interested to hear your thoughts. I guess vision drift would classify as something that is hard to reverse, because you often don't realize it has happened until much later.
My rant about this, not directed to the commenter but in general:
I wish people would have been so interested on discussing and planning with teammates like they seem with AI tools.
Because this is nothing new. Communication, knowing what you are doing, planning... was already a mandatory step for any engineering task.
And if people that use planning with AI then ignore their teammates, other teams, etc. then it is time to reconsidering their way of working.
I save the container for well-planned units of work that can easily be repeated and validated on a branch.
I use direct sessions when I expect and the plan dictates that Claude might go off target and I need to hold the steering wheel.
Fable has increased my use of the container option.