I still need to try them, but I'm having a hard time envisioning async agents being nearly as useful to me as something local like Claude Code because of how often I need to intervene and ensure it is working correctly.
Won't the loop be pretty long-tail if you're using async agents? Like don't you have to pull the code, then go through a whole build/run/test cycle? Seems really tedious vs live-coding locally where I have a hot environment running and can immediately see if the agent goes off the rails.
We use async agents heavily. The key is to have proper validation loops, tests and strong/well phrased system prompts, so the agent can quickly see if something is broken or it broke convention.
We have proper issue descriptions that go into detail what needs to be done, where the changes need to be made and why. Break epics/stories down into smaller issues that can be chopped off easily. Not really different to a normal clean project workflow really.
Now for most of the tickets we just assign them to agents, and 10 minutes later pull requests appears. The pull requests get screened with Gemini Code Assist or Copilot Agent to find obvious issues, and github actions check lint, formatting, tests, etc. This gets pushed to a separate test environment for each branch.
We review the code, test the implementation, when done, click merge. Finished.
I can focus on bigger, more complex things, while the agents fix bugs, handle small features, do refactorings and so on in the background. It's very liberating. I am convinced that most companies/environments will end up with a similar setup and this becomes the norm. There really isn't a reason why not to use async agents.
Yeah sure if you give a giant epic to an agent it will probably act out of line, but you don't really have these issues when following a proper project management flow
Won't the loop be pretty long-tail if you're using async agents? Like don't you have to pull the code, then go through a whole build/run/test cycle? Seems really tedious vs live-coding locally where I have a hot environment running and can immediately see if the agent goes off the rails.