Reforging the workflow for agents
A concrete account of shifting engineering attention from line-by-line review to problem shaping, independent checks, risk triage, and guardrails, with important caveats about project risk and organizational context.
Martin Gratzer describes moving from reviewing each agent-written diff to shaping the work before it starts and improving the system around the agent. He still breaks work into independently shippable vertical slices. Fresh-context reviews, exercised changes, mechanical checks, and risk assessment catch issues; low-risk pull requests can merge automatically, while higher-risk changes come with a focused list of where a person should look.
The key shift is not simply trusting agents more. It is making trust depend on structure: repositories and workflow tooling encode guardrails, and mistakes become reasons to improve those guardrails. Human attention moves toward framing the problem, judging domain-specific questions, and spotting patterns across failures. The author is explicit that this setup does not transfer unchanged to every team: compliance, shared understanding, and higher-stakes production contexts still matter.