Comment by krschacht

Simon, I think this is a good distinction. Another possible term could be: “agent engineering management” or simply “agent managing.”

I am deep in this and one important way in which managing agents is different than managing people is that micro-managing can be your friend. With human engineering colleagues, you need to allow for a healthy degree of “that’s now how I would have written the code, but it’s a reasonable way to write it.” But if my agent writes the test file in the exact same way I do, I can both review and maintain the code more easily.

I have a bunch of short markdown doc files in which I give very specific instructions for how I like code organized: much stricter than I would ever do for a colleague. I’ll tell the agent, “now add tests to this model and follow @unit_tests.md” This file specifies exactly how I like tests named, what order I like them written in the file, etc. I have docs for: models.md, controllers.md, concerns.md, and fixtures.md.