Agent Practice Notes
A short list of working habits, each with the failure it prevents.
A clean tree, every time
The cheapest safety net in the practice: a clean tree before every session, a commit after every accepted step.
Review means reading lines
The closing paragraph is written by the same process that wrote the code, and it is optimistic exactly where you need precision.
- Open the diff file by file, including the files you did not expect.
- Deleted code deserves a second look — that is how behaviour disappears quietly.
- Anything touching dependencies, configuration or credentials deserves the same attention.
- Green tests are not a review. They are one input to it.
One task at a time
A request with three parts produces a diff with three unrelated stories in it, and a review that misses one.
Before sending: can you say in one sentence what would make this attempt a success? If not, it is still a topic.
Ask for proof, not reassurance
“It should work now” is not a result. Run the tests, run the program, look at what came back.
Be sceptical of a test written in the same turn as the fix: it can be shaped to pass rather than to check.
If you cannot explain it, it does not ship
Code you accepted but do not understand is code nobody understands, and the next change to it will be made blind.
When a diff is beyond you, the answer is not to trust it harder: ask what breaks if a line is removed.