The Agentic Dev Loop
Everything you need to design, build, and ship an internal dev system where humans and agents work side by side.
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The shift
From doing the work to watching the work get done.
How do I do the work?
Traditional development. You're the one writing code, running tests, debugging. The entire loop runs through your hands.
The developer era
How do I watch myself work?
AI-assisted development. You're still typing, but now you're observing suggestions, accepting completions, guiding the AI. Half doing, half watching.
The copilot era
How do I watch the agents work?
Agentic development. You're directing and reviewing, not writing. Agents execute. You orchestrate, verify, and course-correct.
The agentic era ← you are here
This shift frees you from typing to focus on product thinking, architecture, and decisions that matter. But it only works if you have the infrastructure to trust what the agents produce.
That's what this site is about: building the systems that let you confidently watch agents do the work.
Your team is integrating agents into development workflows. You need answers — about environments, identity, CI, review, governance, and audit — and you need them now.
This is the reference. It covers how to design:
- execution environments
- identity and secrets
- CI pipelines
- code review systems
- governance controls
- audit trails
…when agents are allowed to participate in the development loop.
In the AI era, inner loop speed and execution velocity matter more than ever. When agents become first-class participants, the loop itself must evolve.
Core Thesis
The problem is not building agents.
The real problem is designing the development system when agents become first-class participants:
In the agent era, the development environment is no longer a laptop. It is a distributed system composed of humans, agents, ephemeral runtimes, CI pipelines, reviewers, policy engines, and audit systems.
23 Guides
Technical pillars of the loop
Execution Environments
Where do humans run code? Where do agents run code? When is execution local vs remote?
Read moreEphemeral Runtimes
Should every task run in a fresh environment? How long do workspaces live?
Read moreReproducible Toolchains
How do we guarantee identical behavior across runs? How do we eliminate snowflake laptops?
Read moreIdentity, Secrets & Trust
Who is an agent, cryptographically? What credentials can it hold? How long do identities live?
Read moreTask Routing & Orchestration
Which agent handles which task? How is concurrency controlled? How are failures retried?
Read moreWho Writes Code?
When are agents allowed to author code? How is authorship recorded? Who owns the result?
Read moreWho Opens Pull Requests?
Can agents open PRs directly? How are branches named and scoped? How are tasks linked to specs?
Read moreCode Review
Which reviews are automated? What do humans still review? How is drift prevented?
Read morePolicy & Guardrails
What actions are forbidden? What violations are blocking? How is drift detected early?
Read moreHuman-in-the-Loop
Where must humans approve? How are confidence thresholds set? How are overrides handled?
Read moreObservability
What do we log? How do we trace actions across systems? How do we measure quality and cost?
Read moreAudit Trails & Provenance
Who did what? In which environment? With which credentials?
Read moreWriting Specs & Prompts
How do you write specs agents can execute against? When is a prompt enough vs. a structured charter?
Read moreLocal-First Dev Environments
How do you set up a local environment that agents can also use? What does the inner loop look like?
Read moreHanding Off Environments to Agents
How do you swap your running dev environment with an agent? How does context transfer work?
Read moreIngress & Public Access
How do agents access running services? How do you expose local or ephemeral environments to the outside?
Read moreAgent-in-the-Loop Implementation
How does an agent participate during the implementation phase? What does the human-agent handshake look like?
Read moreThe Agentic Build Loop
How do you use agents to build agents? What does the meta-loop look like?
Read moreReproduce Steps
Before any implementation begins, how do you verify the bug or behavior you are trying to fix actually exists?
Read moreExpect & Demo Steps
After implementation, how do you verify the change works? What does the acceptance loop look like?
Read moreArtifacts of Success & Failure
What evidence gets produced? Screenshots, logs, test results, diffs — how do you capture and store proof?
Read morePR Review in Practice
What does a real agent-authored PR review look like? Who reviews what, and when does a human step in?
Read moreBuilding with the Claude Agent SDK
How do you use the Claude Agent SDK to wire up agentic workflows? Patterns, gotchas, and practical examples.
Read moreWho This Is For
This site is for:
Roles
- Staff and principal engineers
- Platform / infra engineers
- Engineering leads
- CTOs and founders
Responsibilities
- Development environments
- CI / CD systems
- Code review workflows
- Secrets and identity
- Governance and compliance
Bookmark this
You'll come back here.
Every team building an agentic dev system will hit the same questions — about environments, identity, review, governance, and trust. This is the reference that has the answers.