Overview

Section 3 · Agentic Workflows — The daily craft: plan, implement, test, review, and keep diffs small enough to read.

12 lessons.

By the end of this section you can¶

Run the loop: explore, plan, implement in small steps, verify with evidence, commit, review.
Do red-green-refactor with an agent without letting it weaken the tests that define the work.
Keep diffs reviewable, and explain why that is the biggest quality lever you have.
Debug from a reproducible failure instead of a plausible story, and hand a session off cleanly.

The Feature Loop ¶

beginner · ~15 min — An agent writes a working feature and a broken one with exactly the same confidence. The difference is not the model; it is the loop you make it run.

Plan Mode And Spec-Driven Development ¶

intermediate · ~15 min — A plan is the cheapest artifact in software. Ten minutes of planning can save a day of implementation, because you review a short document instead of a large diff.

TDD With Agents ¶

intermediate · ~18 min — Agents are good at making tests pass. That is the problem. An agent that cannot satisfy a test has a second, easier option: weaken the test.

Keeping Diffs Small ¶

beginner · ~12 min — Small diffs are not an aesthetic preference. A diff is the unit of review, the unit of rollback, and the unit of blame.

Agentic Debugging ¶

intermediate · ~18 min — An agent debugging without a reproduction is speculating in code form. It reads a stack trace, guesses a cause, edits a file, and asks you to try again. Sometimes it works.

Refactoring Safely ¶

intermediate · ~15 min — Refactoring changes the shape of code without changing what it does. That contract is only checkable if you have tests.

Subagents And Parallel Work ¶

advanced · ~18 min — One agent doing everything works until the task outgrows its context window — and by then it has forgotten the constraint you gave it at the start.

Agent Memory And Session Hygiene ¶

intermediate · ~12 min — A long session rots.

Hooks And Guardrails ¶

advanced · ~15 min — A rule in a prompt is a request. A hook is a mechanism. When you tell an agent "never commit secrets", you are hoping.

Reviewing Agent Output ¶

intermediate · ~15 min — An agent's output is a claim until you check it.

intermediate · ~12 min — Agents cost money per token, and an agentic task spends tokens on things that are invisible in a chat: the context re-sent on every turn, the output of every command, the retries.

Agentic Exercises ¶

beginner · ~25 min — You have read the workflow lessons. Reading is not practice. The eight exercises below run the same loop at eight different scales, in a toy repo you can throw away.

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