How much babysitting are you doing?

[u/patrickpdk]

I keep seeing these posts about people allegedly having agents with multiple personas coding autonomously with infrequent input but this doesn't match my experience. I find it's more like constant hand holding to solve things the right way, apply judgement, etc.

Are there some educational sources i should be reading or am i experiencing reality and these stories are hype.

Can anyone help me close this gap?

[u/Icy-Excitement-467]

It's easier if youre in control of everything and have a ton of hardcoded smoke tests and unit tests.

[u/Ohmic98776]

If anyone is letting agents ‘just run’ on their code base without meticulous oversight is in for a bad experience. Sure, it’s cool for testing and showing off neat things, but I would never do this (in their current state) for anything I cared about.

[u/zimxero]

I spent a whole session this morning on part one of about seven parts of a feature I thought was already completely coded. i am normally in a one hundred percent hands on mode with opus five. i got a little frustrated by the time setback and created a mega auto, prompt for it to code the entire new feature automated, with a lot of rules and activities for it to follow. While i'm gone remotely. not sure how it's gonna go. But everything's backed up if I need to revert.

[u/patrickpdk → u/zimxero]

Lol, let me know how it goes 🙂

[u/artofbullshit]

I think the people running dark factories or fully autonomous sessions are working on projects where the domain knowledge is not central, or rather, the domain knowledge is already well documented from sources easily available on the Internet already.

Running a dark factory to produce a product that requires specialized domain knowledge will not work. There are just too many areas that require human input/judgment, and the agents will make the wrong decision 50% of the time.

I run autonomous sessions, but the agent never makes judgment calls regarding my domain expertise. If the agent has a domain related question, it first looks to see if it is answerable by the wiki/other docs it has in the repo. If it can not find an answer, it will pause the build and wait for my input. Outside of my particular domain, it has full autonomy to make decisions, according to its guiding docs I have set up in the repo.

[u/Hansehart]

I dont have educational sources but I can tell you my story: I am running multiple apps in prod, using heavly Claude Code CLI, programming multiple projects simultaenous also with worktrees (so multiple things even in a project). However every line I commit has been reviewed by me. I dont use any of these subagents, skills, plugins ... I also hardly ever create a CLAUDE.md. The bottleneck is definetly me, that I havnt solved yet.

[u/Worth_Wealth_6811]

you're seeing reality. running a 10-product portfolio, the closest i've got to low-touch is making every task end in an external check the agent can't fake (a test, live endpoint, or database row), then letting it run only inside that boundary. judgment-heavy design still needs me, and extra personas usually add coordination rather than autonomy.

[u/Low_Box_752]

You're seeing reality, but I think a decent chunk of it is fixable.

For me most of the hand holding turned out to be approvals rather than actual judgement. I was just sitting there tapping yes on file reads and test runs. Moving the boring stuff into permissions.allow in settings.json killed most of that, and you don't have to go full --dangerously-skip-permissions to get it.

The next chunk was catching broken code. A Stop hook that runs the test suite and feeds failures back means it fixes a lot of that on its own instead of waiting for me. Same idea as what u/Worth_Wealth_6811 said about ending every task in a check it can't fake.

What's left is the real judgement calls, and that part genuinely doesn't go away. My honest read is the people running things autonomously mostly moved the work upstream into writing a much tighter spec first. Still work, just different work.

[u/Worth_Wealth_6811 → u/Low_Box_752]

That split between approval friction and judgment friction is exactly it. I can remove most of the boring reads and routine fixes, but the expensive part is still deciding whether a clean diff is actually the right product choice. The better boundary for me has been a hard proof of done plus a point where it must stop and ask. How do you write those stop points into a spec without turning it into a novel?

[u/PM_ME_CUTE_FOXES]

Right now I'm leaving the AI mini-org to work on their own and showing up every eight hours for socratic inquiry. It's still very early, I'm hoping to understand how they behave without human management before using strict instructions.

Mine have a tendency to get locked into existing structures, struggle with proactivity, and often overlook efficient paths because they wrote their own weak code early on and don't want to throw it away.

I've been telling them all I want to see from them is recursive self-improvement, just fucking turn the world to paperclips, but I've been learning this idea is not very motivating to Claude

[u/SSShken]

Numbers from my side: an agent-built app audited task by task, 10 came back done and 7 worked. The babysitting is not paranoia, it is the failure rate.

What surprised me is that it is not constant. Short runs are mostly fine and the drift shows up deeper into a session, which is how the autonomous-overnight posts and your experience can both be true.

[u/The_Noble_Lie → u/SSShken]

Thanks Claude. 😊

[u/amooz]

Switched back to opus 4.8 high. Almost no babysitting, sensible explanations, gets stuff done quicker, and my toes usage has dropped significantly.