Postmortem: 3 weeks of a driver + reviewer agent split on a native Mac app
Moist_Tonight_3997 · reddit · 2026-10-08
The dev of Buffer (MIT, fully local native Mac clipboard manager) reviews what held up three weeks after shipping v3.0 on a two-agent workflow: one agent drives implementation, a second reviews diffs with fresh context.
What held up
- The reviewer-agent pattern: second model, fresh context, instructed to argue against the diff. Caught a silent history mutation in an external PR, missing clip-diffing tests, and dead settings branches. Still run on every diff over 100 lines.
- Settled specs: handing the agent a voted-on design decision makes execution one-pass — the highest-leverage move.
- Real-device testing as a separate phase: gesture feel can't be model-reviewed; a full blocked day on the trackpad beats three rounds of 'looks correct'.
What was dropped
- Having the reviewer also fix issues: fixes were confident and sometimes wrong in new directions; reviewer convinces, driver fixes, human merges.
- Review for tiny diffs (<100 lines): overhead beats value.
- Physics-model solutions to gesture problems: 'make zooming work' produced an unnecessary physics engine; a hand-written scale+offset state machine was the fix.
Result: 2,000 downloads of v3.0, zero production bug reports in 3 weeks. Repo: github.com/samirpatil2000/Buffer
Related event: Indie Dev Ships Mac App v3.0 Using Driver-Reviewer Dual-Agent Workflow(2 posts)→
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