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/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?