EngineeringSpec Journal
Authority before autonomy.
Ideas and field notes on making repository change authority explicit, reviewable, and independently verifiable as coding agents take on more work.
Give Coding Agents Permission, Not Just Prompts
Context tells an agent what it knows. Validation tells us whether its change worked. Engineering teams still need an explicit answer to what the agent was allowed to change.
When 70% of Pull Requests Come From Agents, Who Decides What They’re Allowed to Change?
Uber’s agentic SDLC offers a glimpse of where software engineering is heading—and exposes a question we may soon need to answer explicitly.