~/Code/jduncan-blog
Engineering, craft, and curiosity.
Self-taught engineer, recovering history major. Tech, woodworking, home automation.
Agentic development is two different jobs, judgement and mechanics, and we keep running them through one chat window. A series on designing the contract between humans and agents, with a month of data from my own software factory.
If humans and agents do different work, something has to sit between them. In my factory, that's a GitHub issue written as a contract: humans define done, machines check it.
My software factory isn't a pipeline. It's loops inside loops, and only one of them needs a person. A month of data on the loops that build, fix, simplify and watch themselves.
My software factory spent 7.5 billion tokens in a month. Here's what that number hides, where the tokens really go, and why the human side costs more than you'd think.
Quality gates don't go away when agents write the code. Humans just stop staring at them. A month of factory data on where quality actually comes from, and why the merge button doesn't matter.