How do you go from writing code to deploying with agents?
Been doing hardcode agent driven coding for the past year. I feel like I now have to test all my code locally with agents reviewing them and ideally testing them. Unfortunately I feel like the traditional CI/CD testing is starting to feel like a formality. Would love to know what everyone is doing, and if I'm not the only one making a mistake.
Testing is not a formality. In fact, it's better and easier than ever. Tell your agents to develop your code-base with Red-Green-Refactor Test-driven development. Write failing tests first and run them, then write the code to make the tests pass, then refactor the code as needed. I used to hate writing tests before, but now that I can offload that (and the development, honestly) to AI, it's nothing to keep up with it. Your codebase quality will increase with TDD, because it will reduce the number of things that inadvertently break during updates. Things will break loudly and can be easily fixed (again, by AI) before shipping. If something does manage to get through, add more tests to cover it for next time.
This actually makes the LLMs better at coding as well. They can verify their own results and iterate with far less manual validation.
More testing is better, so far! I'm using the same red-green-refactor TDD idea, and having Claude use Superpowers code review and running Coderabbit CLI on it all before pushing to CI/CD, which also runs a series of tests (mostly security ones).
Someone else posted that whenever something broke they would ask 'Why was it built that way?' to try to have the bot fix it's own coding patterns.. as well as adding a regression test to ensure it did not happen again.
I also have it do dry-runs and then do live on one item before batching. Catches a lot of things!
Oh, and insist that it RTFM's the API if you're using one.
We still create a ton of end-to-end tests and run them a lot. What changed for us is the review process. While our whole team uses agents to do reviews, we also ask other team members to review the coding session itself rather than the diff. That team member can ask the coding session questions about the architecture decisions, scalability, edge cases, ..etc.
Disclosure: I'm building AQ (aq.dev), which is partly why I'm deep in this. We wrote up the session-review practice here: https://aq.dev/guides/how-to-review-an-ai-coding-session/. The practice works with any agents too, nothing tool-specific about it.