Ask HN: Do coding agents optimize the wrong review step
So the idea behind this is to approve intent before letting the agent touch the codebase. That sounds reasonable, but in practice, it’s not where the real learning happens.
The "plan mode" takes place before the agent has paid the cost of reality. Before it’s navigated the repo, before it’s run tests, before it’s hit weird edge cases or dependency issues. The output is speculative by design, and it usually looks far more confident than it should.
What will actually turn out to be more useful is reviewing the walkthrough: a summary of what the agent did after it tried to solve the problem.
Currently, in most coding agents, the default still treats the plan as the primary checkpoint and the walkthrough comes later. That puts the center of gravity in the wrong place.
My experience with SWE is that we don’t review intent and trust execution. We review outcomes: the diff, the test changes, what broke, what was fixed, and why. That’s effectively a walkthrough.
So I feel when we give feedback on a walkthrough, we’re reacting to concrete decisions and consequences, and not something based on hypotheticals. This feedback is clearer, more actionable, and closer to how we, as engineers, already review work today. Curious if others feel the same when using plan-first coding agents. The reason is that I’m working on an open source coding agent, and have decided to keep less emphasis on approving plans upfront and more emphasis on reviewing what the agent actually experienced while doing the work.
But this is something we’re heavily debating internally inside our team, and would love to have thoughts so that it can help us implement this in the best way possible.