New agent tools appear constantly. Some are excellent. Most reviews you read are written by
people who used the tool for two days.
Here is how to judge one in an hour, and how to avoid regretting it later.
Six questions to ask any agent tool
1. Can I see what it is doing?
If it works silently and hands you a finished result, you cannot catch mistakes early. You
only find them at the end, when they are large.
2. Can I stop it?
Mid-action, cleanly. You will need this constantly.
3. Can I control permissions?
If the only choices are “ask about everything” or “allow everything”, you will pick the
second one within a week and stop reading.
4. Does it work with git?
If your undo button still works, most mistakes cost you a minute.
5. Can I see the exact changes before they are saved?
Reviewing a change you did not write is a core skill. A tool that hides changes prevents it.
6. Can I leave?
This is the one people forget. Read the next section.
Avoiding lock-in
As you get better, you will build up things that make the agent work well on your project:
notes about your project’s rules, useful instructions you reuse, small custom commands. That
is Module 6, and it is genuinely valuable.
Here is the trap. If those live inside one product’s account, moving costs you everything
you built.
The rule:
Keep everything that describes your project inside your project, as plain text files, in
git.
A file describing your project’s rules is readable by any tool, including tools that do not
exist yet. If you switch, you copy one file. Most agent tools have converged on reading a
plain text file from your project folder for exactly this reason.
What stays valuable no matter what
Everything in this list survives any tool change:
- Writing a clear request (Module 2)
- Recognising the four beats (Module 3)
- Working in small steps you can undo (Module 4)
- Reading a change you did not write (Module 4)
- Building things the agent can check itself against (Module 5)
- Writing down your project’s rules in plain text (Module 6)
Notice that none of it is a product name. That is on purpose. This list is the actual
syllabus of the course. The tools are how you practise it.
A note on speed
Every new tool claims to be faster. Be careful with that word.
Producing code faster is not the same as producing working code faster. A tool that writes
in thirty seconds what takes you twenty minutes to check has not saved you anything.
Judge tools on how quickly you reach working, checked, committed code. That number is
often better in the tool that shows you more and asks more.
Before Module 4
- Score your chosen tool out of 6 on the questions above. Which does it fail?
- Check where your tool stores its settings. Inside your project, or in an account
somewhere? - Make sure your Recall folder is committed and clean. Module 4 starts building for real.