657 PRs and 449 Issues in 30 Days: When Agents Follow Your Backlog Rules Too Well
thechrisperry · x · 2026-08-26
Ex-Googler Allen Hutchison shares a hard-won lesson from his two-person startup Vycari: they gave coding agents a rule that sounded obviously right — "any PR follow-up gets filed as an issue before review closes." The agents followed it perfectly. Over 30 days they merged 657 PRs (30 per weekday), but also generated 449 issues, 15 per day, most filed by the agents themselves, with no mechanism closing the loop — the backlog grew faster the more time he gave it.
Of 300 open issues, only 69 were real work; the rest were decisions in disguise. He argues many bug-database conventions are really accommodations to human limitations, and in the agent era the backlog should become a living record of ongoing work rather than where issues go to die. First post in a series on how they build Vycari.
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