Most agent failures that look like coding mistakes start as gaps in what was agreed. These articles cover how much specification a feature needs, keeping an agent in planning until the plan is approved, writing a definition of done a stub would fail, splitting large features into checkable tasks, and changing a specification halfway through.
5 articles
Sort mid-build news into clarification, changed requirement or separate feature, trace each changed requirement to the work built on it, publish a revision that names what it supersedes, and review the diff against it.
Why long agent runs degrade on large features, how to cut a feature into checkable behaviours, how small each task should be, what integration checks the seams need, and which evidence should start the next task or revise the plan.
Why agents tick off placeholders, how to write acceptance criteria a stub would fail, how to trace each criterion to a change and a check, who may waive one, and which hooks keep the agent from closing its own task.
What a coding agent can learn from your codebase, what still needs a decision from you, the minimum spec for any feature, when to write more, and how to tell whether the spec saved rework.
What Claude Code, Codex and Cursor plan modes hold back, what a plan needs before you approve it, how to record that approval against one plan version, and which host checks actually stop an early edit.
