Pair loop and ship gate

When agents write code, the hard job moves. Generation is cheap. Review and release are not.

The pair loop

In our product-squad setup, engineering is not the human types while the agent watches. It is closer to pair programming with a tireless junior who never sleeps and sometimes hallucinates with confidence.

Typical flow:

1. Spec and board items exist with enough context to be real work

2. Dev agent implements on a branch, tests, opens a PR

3. Orchestrator keeps product context attached so the change is not orphaned

4. Security review when the surface warrants it

5. Human engineer reviews: architecture, edge cases, whether this should ship at all

6. Human deploys

With strong context and workflows, correction rates drop. They never hit zero. Zero would mean you stopped looking.

The orchestrator problem

When agents generate more PRs than a team can thoughtfully review, speed becomes noise. Fatigue is a systems failure, not a personal weakness.

We manage that by:

• Batching work instead of infinite parallel noise

• Keeping board and health trustworthy so agents do not invent busywork

• Using cheaper models for browser chores and script collectors for metrics

• Refusing to treat opened a PR as the definition of done

Done means reviewed, integrated, and intentionally released.

Ship gate

Only a human has production deploy authority. That is not nostalgia. It is a trust boundary.

Agents can prepare release notes, update board status, draft checklists, stage previews. They do not get an unattended path that merges and goes live while everyone is asleep. If that ever changes, it will be a deliberate policy with audit trails, not a default that felt convenient one Friday.

What the human is optimizing for

Not lines of code. Fit: does this change solve the right problem, at the right risk, with enough understanding that the next incident is diagnosable?

Agents are excellent at producing candidates. Humans are responsible for selection. When creation is easy, taste and accountability are the scarce skills.

If your agentic setup has no ship gate, you do not have APD/M. You have a random number generator with CI.