Overview
Delegating to an AI agent follows many of the same principles as delegating to a junior or mid-level developer. The delegate needs a coherent task, understandable boundaries, access to the relevant parts of the system, and a way to know when the work is complete.
Strategic preparation includes several activities:
- Design the hard parts before implementation begins. Resolve the architectural decisions that will
constrain the rest of the work.
- Scope tasks tightly. A task should be small enough that the agent can complete it without
inventing major product or architecture decisions.
- Define module interfaces. The agent should know how the component it changes interacts with the
rest of the codebase.
- Establish tests and acceptance conditions. The agent needs objective signals that distinguish a
completed change from a plausible-looking change.
- Provide enough documentation to direct navigation. The documentation does not need to explain
everything, but it should point the agent toward the correct files, modules, and conventions.
- Preserve the roadmap and product intent at the human level. The agent may implement a task, but
the human remains responsible for deciding whether that task advances the larger mission.
This division of labor avoids two opposite errors. The first is micromanaging every tactical detail, which wastes the agent's implementation capacity. The second is delegating strategic thinking, which leaves the agent to make decisions it does not have the real-world context to make reliably.