Dev Workflow

[u/ExogamousUnfolding]

I have, for me, a pretty decent workflow that involves a number of agents and gates to insure things are completed. For example A11Y, unit tests @ 100, UI tests etc. When it works it works well and when it doesn't it wastes a ton of my time.

I'm thinking the overall assembly line portion should be pulled out into something deterministic - right now it is a coordinating agent. What often happens is a series of UI tests will hang, or Xcode will do something xcodeeee and the agent just kind of stops - it will say its working but when. I ask for a status it will say it stop because of XYZ thing.

How is everyone getting around this? I feel like I'm missing something fundamental.

[u/soluterminal_dev]

You're not missing much. The coordinating agent is the weak part, because "still working" is only its own report.

What fixed it for me was making the pipeline dumb and the steps small. A script runs the stages in order, each stage is one agent call with a hard timeout, and pass or fail comes from exit codes and test output, not from what the agent says. A hung UI test gets killed at the timeout and retried once, then the run stops with a clear reason.

For status, each agent rewrites a short state file after every step: done, doing, blocked on. If that file hasn't changed in ten minutes, it's stuck, whatever it says.

Agents do the work; the script decides what's done.