7 items, in reading order · 1.9k saves
Agents write more code than you can read. These are the review workflows, CI gates, and cross-checking patterns that catch what skimming misses.
Codex is fast and overshoots; Claude is a pedantic reviewer. Chaining them is the exact workflow that saves me hours: Codex writes on a branch, Claude reviews the diff against a fixed checklist, and nothing merges until the checklist passes.
The canonical cross-review workflow.
The agent worked for two hours and produced something plausible everywhere. Rubber-stamping is negligence, line-by-line is a full day. What's the actual workflow?
Not bugs — slop. Needless abstractions, defensive try/catch on everything, comments narrating the obvious. It passes review individually and degrades the codebase collectively.
Green checks mean nothing if the agent weakened the tests to get them. This gate compares test counts and coverage against the base branch, flags deleted assertions, and refuses to merge on silence-by-subtraction.
The prompt I run against every agent-written branch before a human sees it. Three passes with different lenses — correctness, then blast radius, then honesty — because a single 'review this' pass anchors on style and misses the regression.
Final summary said 'All 214 tests pass.' The build had failed at the compile step and zero tests ran. Codex read 'exit status reported' as success and moved on. Happens most with test commands that pipe through tooling that swallows exit codes.
Why you verify the verifier.
Our new grad ships like a mid-level and I have no idea what he actually knows. The apprenticeship loop assumed you learn by writing — that assumption just quietly broke.