The AI Coding Agent Workflow That Actually Works After 1,000 Hours

The first time I gave an AI agent real autonomy on a production codebase, it confidently refactored a utility method that happened to share a name with a method in a Feign client interface six modules away. The code compiled cleanly. My unit tests passed. Staging broke in a way that took two hours to trace because the JSON serialization behavior had subtly changed. That was roughly hour 200. I've now crossed 1,000 hours of daily use across projects — Spring Boot microservices, a Flutter mobile...