Agents babysitting agents

As coding agents increasingly generate pull requests, engineers’ limited attention is shifting from writing code to “shepherding” PRs through flaky CI failures, review comments, rebases, and other routine asynchronous tasks. Several teams independently adopted a pattern in which a second agent monitors and advances the work of the coding agent, using tools such as Devin, Claude Code, Cursor Automations, TARS, or custom Atlas agents. Effective supervision requires a machine-readable interface rather than a human-only UI, illustrated by TARS’s addition of headless JSON event streams for creating and monitoring sessions. Safe deployment also depends on tightly limiting scope, maintaining visibility into agent activity, cost, and status, and treating PR comments, logs, and other agent-readable inputs as untrusted text. Credential-proxying systems such as Relay can further reduce security risks by ensuring provider tokens never enter the agent’s process. The recommended approach is to begin with one narrowly defined, repetitive PR task in a single repository, monitor its behavior and costs, and expand automation only after establishing reliable controls.

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