Don't get too far ahead of the agent

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I started Sherwood I designed the whole thing up front — including the front-end, before I’d built any of the backend. It felt productive. I expected that the agent would just be able to code until it was done, but by the time we got to the front-end, the backend had already drifted from the plan, and I had a pile of drift to reconcile that I should have caught earlier. You hear a lot of the term ‘Human in the Loop’ posed as a solution for this problem, and it’s true that it helps, but this also slows development, and I don’t want to be a bottleneck. So today I learned that designing too far ahead is its own kind of drift. A human in the loop catches it, but agents write faster than one person can review, so keeping pace will eventually have to be automated.

Drift on Alex Herrero

Don't get too far ahead of the agent