What To Optimize For With Coding Agents

When you start to use agentic coding tools - like Claude Code, or OpenAI Codex, or OpenCode - it can be overwhelming at first. Coding agents like these are overpowered Swiss-army chainsaws. They have a great deal of leverage, and that leverage is strange; it can be hard to know how to work with them in a way that doesn't cause problems later. Let me suggest a good approach: Optimize for understandability. In other words, as you start using coding agents in new ways, experimenting with what works, the way you decide "what works" is that what the agent creates is understandable to you.