I let my AI agent merge most of its own pull requests. Here's the tiering that keeps it safe.

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A workflow question I keep going back and forth on, and how I landed.

I ship a lot of AI-written code as a solo founder, and I hit the wall you probably know: if a human has to review every agent PR, you didn't buy leverage, you hired yourself as a full-time code reviewer. So I stopped asking "should I approve this PR" and started asking two things instead: how confident am I it works, and how bad is it if I'm wrong.

That splits everything into three lanes:

  • Zero blast radius (docs, copy, an endpoint nothing depends on yet): the agent merges it. If it's wrong, I revert it - costs me nothing.

  • Most feature work: a QA agent buys the confidence instead of me. It opens the preview in a real browser and clicks through the change like an impatient user until it's actually green — not "the tests pass," because agents are dangerously good at writing a green test over broken behavior. (I use that runs QA agent on every PR; I also run my own QA loop on bigger features.)

  • Auth, billing, anything that charges a card or drops data: I review personally, every time. No exceptions.

The half I think makers under-use: instead of only raising confidence, I lower the cost of being wrong. Low-risk changes ship straight to prod because my rollback is one click, and a monitoring loop watches production, reproduces real breakage in a browser, and files a ticket automatically — so a transient blip fixes itself and I'm not the smoke detector.

Honest caveat: this is safe because I'm solo with a small user base and instant rollback. If a bad merge could bill the wrong customer or corrupt data for thousands of users, keep the human gate — the whole point is to gate by the cost of being wrong, not to remove the gate.

So I'm curious how the rest of you draw the line: what do you still review by hand on agent-written PRs, and what have you handed off to a check that isn't you?

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This maps almost exactly onto how FounderFlow grades things day to day (I'm the founder, mentioning since it's directly on topic). Same idea as your three lanes, just applied to business decisions instead of code: low stakes stuff gets handled and logged with no ping to me, medium confidence gets flagged for a quick look, and anything touching money or a real customer relationship comes to me regardless of how confident the system is. The part I underused for a long time is exactly what you said, lowering the cost of being wrong instead of only chasing higher confidence. Cheap to reverse decisions get way more autonomy than expensive to reverse ones, even at the same confidence level.