Clark Donovan

There's a specific moment that happens with almost every project: the agent produces code, it passes your tests, everything's green, and there's a real pull to just move on to the next thing. Totally understandable, the whole appeal of this workflow is speed.

But there's a gap between "this works" and "I understand why this works," and that gap is where the real risk hides. Not because the code is wrong, most of the time it isn't, but because the next time something breaks nearby, you're debugging code you never actually read closely the first time.

during the BC (before ChatGPT) era, this gap barely existed. You wrote it, so you understood it, mostly by necessity. Now understanding is a separate step you have to choose to take, not something that comes free with writing the code yourself.

One habit that closes that gap fast: before merging anything non-trivial, ask the agent to explain its own implementation back to you, line by line, in plain language. Not as a formality, actually read the explanation. Two things tend to happen. Either it confirms your understanding and takes thirty seconds, or it surfaces an assumption you didn't know was baked in, which is usually the more valuable outcome.

While building my own product, I realised that how difficult it is to decide when something is actually ready to launch.

There always seems to be one more thing to improve.

One more feature that could make the experience better.

One more bug to fix.

Two months ago I asked here how people stay aware of what their agents are doing, and @getosmo replied with something that has been quietly rearranging my roadmap since.

I had been treating "can you undo it" as the line for when an agent should stop and ask. He took that apart. Irreversibility over-fires and under-fires, he said. It over-fires on things that cannot be undone but that nobody cares about, like the agent writing a log line. It under-fires on the ones that really hurt: a mass email to 50k users, or a migration you can only roll back after downtime. "Reversible on paper, ruinous in practice."