Working Better With My Agents
What keeps us both on the rails!
Over a long time now, I have been giving my agents, mostly Claude now, more and more work, not less.
BUT I had to learn — the hard way — what discipline that requires.
Two years ago, working with earlier-generation AI agents, I would let them run too free during development.
The output looked productive. I watched the work appear and said "great, test it."
Hours and days and weeks later, I was debugging architecture decisions I never consciously made.
The agent had taken them while I was embracing the velocity.
I'd developed a system I owned on paper, but I didn't own fully enough in my own head.
What I did to get out of the holes that I made for myself:
1. Plan the architecture first. Before any code, agree on the shape together.
2. Agree on the plan specifically. Not "go ahead" — "proceed with steps 1, 2, and 3 as written."
3. Keep the plan living. Revisit it on the page when reality fights back.
4. Track status and revise explicitly. Don't drift — re-agree.
Here's what surprised me: this discipline matters MORE with Higher Reasoning AI, not less.
Weaker agents produced visibly off work. The drift was easy to catch.
The current generation of HIGH reasoning AI agents produce work that looks brilliant on first read:
* clean diffs,
* passing tests,
* good names.
That's exactly when it's easiest to sign off without staying in agreement.
And that's when you ship architecture you didn't consciously decide.
That's why I've had to develop many other development principles also ...
that my agents and I work from TOGETHER!
The proof has been in the applications that I am developing now, like PostalDataPI, my postal code API:
- Zero production rollbacks in 24+ days since our architecture cutover
- Zero errors on the production service in the last six days
- 137 tests, all green, on a single shared fixture (an architecture we agreed on together first)
- Six pieces of work shipped end-to-end in one Saturday session, no rollbacks
The output volume isn't despite the discipline. It's because of it.
I hope this helped SOMEONE out there!
Until next time,
Thom