When coding agents outpace humans, is the Git diff still the right unit of review?

Important-Ice9444 · reddit · 2026-09-15

A Reddit deep-dive argues that as coding agents run dozens of tool calls, install dependencies, spawn subagents, and touch state that never appears in the final diff, the Git diff becomes just one projection of what actually happened — and reading full transcripts doesn't scale either. The author proposes that a mature agent harness must also serve the human supervisor: runtime-evidence-based summaries answering what the agent was allowed to do, what it actually did, what persistent state changed, what external high-consequence actions ran, what verification executed, and where it deviated from plan — with drill-down to raw diffs, commands, and traces. The unit of human review should move upward to consequences, decisions, evidence, and exceptions. The post ends by asking heavy agent users what they actually inspect before trusting agent output.

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