I'm of the belief that at this point the talking heads in the AI space who are saying that they have 500 agents going at once all autonomously, running slash goals and especially loop slash loop, are outright lying or leaving out key details. I do believe this is a future of engineering but right now the idea that you just open up your repo and let the agent go buck wild is only true if you're vibe coding a pet project.

Here's some of the things that I do in infrastructure I build with real examples from production code.

Note that this article is tailored towards people who are exactly just vibe coding (although I think it will still be helpful if this isn't you)

Let me know if you guys have any other ideas, comments, questions, or critiques. A co-worker suggested I post something like this as they said it changed how they develop with AIs. Again this is just how I like to work. You are free to handle things your own way.

  
TLDR

What actually works is hooks. Without hooks you have nothing.

Everything else like compilers, type systems, macros, and contracts should serve one goal: make hooks more structured, easier to write, and less footgunny. Starts with rethinking your language choice (whenever possible), static before dynamic makes this easier and more deterministic.

Hooks can show up in any fashion. Style checks, precommit hooks, banning APIs you don't like, naming conventions you don't like, file size limits, whatever. Be general.

The goal is the pit of success where the right thing is the only thing. Take Rust as an example. You can build macros where the macro owns the shape and the author doesn't get to sneak in bad attributes. That cuts down on code. It cuts down on tokens. And it gives the AI ways to check itself instead of just guessing + a cli that has the agent check itself against the blessed, already tested macro.

[https://github.com/CheckPickerUpper/perfect-typescripter](https://github.com/CheckPickerUpper/perfect-typescripter)

Here is an example of a diminished version of one of my hooks, you can see how opinionated it is from this in our production version. It's far stronger, mixing different code style lints as well as code correctness lints, which makes writing slop hard to impossible. 

How I'm able to actually use /goal and /loop in production code without monitoring my agents