The problem with
letting agents run unattended
I run several coding agents headless on my workstation. One reviews
pull requests, one implements tickets from a written plan, one watches
repositories and regenerates documentation when the code moves. They are
started by timers and scripts, so nobody is sitting at a terminal when
they finish.
Most of their work is safe to do alone: reading code, running tests,
writing a report to disk. A few steps are not. Posting a review comment
under my name, pushing a branch, opening a PR, deploying to a shared
environment. Those are outward facing and hard to take back, and I want
to see them before they happen.
A permission prompt needs a terminal. Email is too slow to act on. A
web dashboard is one more thing to keep running. What I already had open
all day was Telegram on my phone, and Telegram bots support buttons
under a message. So every risky step became a message with
Approve, Show and
Skip under it.