01 · The Problem
Where the guess comes from
Agents don’t ask. They guess. A new engineer who can’t tell whether a change
is right will ask someone. Your agent has one way to find out whether it succeeded:
whatever your repository can prove.
One audited repository, a TypeScript and SQL trading library of about 5,000 lines, gave
its agent plenty to read, 75 out of 100, and almost nothing to check against:
14 out of 100. Agent context files, a README, a lockfile, a clean secrets scan,
and very few tests beside the source. Every change the agent made there was marked done
on its own say-so, because nothing in the repo could tell it otherwise. Until that second
number moves, a better prompt and a better model land on the same guess.
A lock you can’t open isn’t the same as a lock you can’t inspect.
Which is the useful part. The fix is ordinary engineering with a schedule attached:
tests on the paths that matter, checks wired into CI, the conventions your team already
follows written down once. Waiting for the next model release won’t help. It has
never seen your codebase.