You give the agent a one-sentence task. It immediately writes code. The code is plausible. It is also not what you wanted. The discipline teams skip first: brainstorm before code, no exceptions.
Workflow
Structured approaches to AI-assisted dev — spec-driven development, planning skills, brainstorm-before-code, OpenSpec and OPSX artifacts.
A ten-task plan drifts by task four. The model is not forgetful. The plan is too coarse. Tasks that look discrete to you blur together in execution. Smaller tasks with sharper edges fix it.
The reliability problem is not the model. It is the missing disciplines around the model. Brainstorm before code. Plan before implement. Test before pass. Verify before claim. Review before merge.
Two agents in two threads share the filesystem but not context. They make decisions based on stale state. The fix is one fresh agent per task with isolated context.
Traditional workflow forces phases. You cannot go back. You cannot test individual pieces. Real work does not happen in phases. The fix is actions you take anytime, in any order.
The default workflow does not fit your team. You can abandon it, or customize it. Three levels: project config (easy), custom schemas (flexible), global overrides (power). Most teams should stop at level one.
Specs go stale because updating them is painful. The fix is a format that lets you describe changes without rewriting. ADDED, MODIFIED, REMOVED. Three sections, no full-rewrite pain.
You open a change folder. Four artifact files. You do not know which to update when the design was wrong. Most teams guess. Artifacts drift out of sync. The fix is knowing what each is for.
You inherited a codebase with no specs. The agent guesses at everything. The trick is not to spec backward. Spec going forward, one change at a time. Thirty-minute setup, propose-apply-archive loop.
Spawning agents is the easy part. Reviewing their autonomous decisions without a logging contract is the bottleneck. Here is the format that fixed it for me.
One worktree is a parallel workspace. Ten worktrees is a lifecycle problem. Without naming, cleanup, and ordering rules, the directory becomes a graveyard.
An agent that takes forty minutes to finish a task cannot survive a laptop sleep. The fix is not faster agents. It is a session that outlives the client.