I've had similar thoughts lately while using agents for coding. It seems like if I give the agents external tools and sources of truth they perform really well.

I've had similar thoughts lately while using agents for coding. It seems like if I give the agents external tools and sources of truth they perform really well. In my case it was a lot of standards, extensive use of Rust language features (e.g. traits), formal methods tools, large-scale architecture and specification documents (accessed via a special tool I also wrote), and using the beads_rust tool for tracking session state and giving the agent a list of issues to work. I hadn't thought of this as 'backpressure' but I really like that framing. It gives the agents guardrails and context and external validity that it can't make up.