The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding

heh, I'm probably the guy on the team who annoys people because I insist on checking md files in, but ironically I'm also one of the few people in the team who doesn't believe in prompt engineering at all.

what I want to check in are the bots' planning notes - I will work with the LLM to plan some feature out, iterate on it a bit, and then tell it to refine the plan into a series of self contained steps and then implement those as a stack of commits. I'll admit, I barely read the md files, what I do is read every commit thoroughly, rework it, have claude or whatever keep refining individual commits and restacking, until everything looks good and I send the code out for review, at which point it goes through more refining, sometimes extensive.

through all that, my theory is that the plan md files help act as the bot's working memory, and having them checked in and modified alongside the code keeps it on track.

as an aside I'm super happy to be working in a team where LLM generated code is held to the same "read every line and make sure commits are good" standard that we used to hold human code to.