TOOLS

Most coding agents do not fail because they are weak. They fail because they are hard to inspect. The real problem with coding agents is not autonomy. It’s easy to make them “autonomous”. The problem is observability. A lot of tools still look impressive right until the moment they say “done”, move on, and when you check, the thing is half-built, wrong, or never happened. It happens to me almost every day, and if you don’t check for it, you might as well skip half your to-do tasks… That is why I care so much about observability and control in agentic coding. Not just more tool calls. Not just more agents. Not just more autonomy. I want to see the diff. I want to review the exact line and ensure it was done, and understand how. I want to send (only relevant) feedback back into the context. I want to compare models on a real task in my repo instead of guessing. That is what I found interesting in the rebuilt Kilo Code extension on VS Code. Yes, the parallel subagents and tons of features are cool. But the part I care about more is the (human) review loop around them. You can inspect what each agent changed, comment directly on the diff, and send those comments back as structured context. That matters. Because the value of these tools is not just in generation. It is correction. It is debugging weird hallucinations (and other LLM weaknesses). It is catching the moments where the model says “I made it” and absolutely did not. And honestly, model comparison on real tasks is underrated too. Benchmarks are nice. Your repo and actual use case are way nicer. If a tool helps you compare quality, behaviour, and likely cost on your own codebase, that is real value. A 2026 tool NEEDS to be focusing around models’ weaknesses, which starts with observability and monitoring. And, unfortunately, observability, control, and evaluation are still missing layers in many agent products. I highly recommend trying it out and taking the time to review agents’ code in general! I put the link in the comments if you want to try it. What do you care about more in coding agents today: more autonomy, or more observability?

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