Telling Gemini's Astra to log build and test times made it cut its own bottlenecks
yacineMTB · x · 2026-09-17
Developer @gandamuml shared a neat experiment: he instructed Astra (Gemini's agent) that "rate of productivity" is the most important metric, and asked it to record elapsed times for all builds, verification runs, test development, and its own dev time.
The agent responded by deciding to cut a lot of the build and test time on its own. The takeaway is a copyable technique: make time measurement an explicit goal in agent instructions, and the agent will start optimizing workflow bottlenecks by itself.
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