GoKawiilThere are two obvious ways to use coding agents. Both are bad.
The first is to let the LLM run unattended and hope the repository survives. This is fast, exciting, and stupid. It leads to bugs, confused changes, and a flood of PRs that humans cannot review quickly enough, at least not without eventually lowering their standards and merging things they do not really understand.
The second approach is to treat the agent like glorified autocomplete and force a human to review every tiny step. This is safer, but slow enough to partially defeat the purpose of using an agent in the first place. If you still have to steer every minor decision, you have not delegated much.
In this post, I’ll cover a third, not-so-obvious approach: building ways for the agent to validate more of its own work before a human has to step in. The goal to make longer unattended sessions safe enough to be useful without fully removing the human from the loop. It should also reduce the number of low-quality PRs your teammates have to review for details the agent should have caught itself.
What backpressure is and how it can help
In systems engineering, backpressure is the mechanism by which a downstream component signals upstream that it can't accept more work, forcing the producer to slow down, buffer, or shed load.
Whenever there's no backpressure, the producer is free to generate work at will, and the consumer is forced to absorb the mismatch. Then, the consumer either falls behind, breaks under the load, or speeds up by cutting corners.
In our work, backpressure usually takes the form of a machine refusing work the producer hasn't cleaned up yet. The simplest version of that is an automated test: you don't usually submit a PR with failing tests. Ideally, your colleagues shouldn't even review a PR until all tests are green. In that case, the test suite is the backpressure mechanism for a human to clean up their code before asking for a review.
Automated tests are backpressure: the developer iterates against fast local test feedback, so the reviewer only ever sees code that's already green.
In addition to automated testing, types can also be a powerful form of backpressure.
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