Tighten an Agent Run With Stop Rules
Watch an open-ended agentic refactor request become a bounded run with clear handoff and review points.
Request: “clean up the notification pipeline.” Inspect -> choose one lane -> patch -> validate -> summarize -> stop The trap is letting the agent stay in exploration mode while also expecting a mergeable patch to emerge eventually. Step 1 Ask the agent to inspect the notification pipeline and return a grouped map of issues by surface: queueing, formatting, retries, and observability. The first run earns understanding without editing anything yet. Step 2 Choose one lane: retries. Rewrite the next prompt so the agent may edit only files on the retry call path. You convert broad exploration into a single…
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