In reading order.
Agents now work unattended for stretches long enough that the conversation can no longer save you - why unstructured runs fail, the five-phase PREVC workflow I adapted from an open-source skeleton, and where this ten-part series goes.
PREVC's Planning phase has the agent decompose the work the way project managers always have, then do something no methodology asked of it - grade its own plan. The work breakdown structure, the fifteen-minute waterfall, and the three scores I added.
The Review phase is where a human takes an agent-graded plan and does the three things no score can - raise clarity, raise completion, minimise complexity - then encodes intent before a line of code exists. Why I call its exit the workflow's most important handoff.
Execution is not one heroic pass - it is a three-step inner loop in which the agent codes, the output is read against the specification, and over-engineering is actively stripped out. The loop is my extension to the borrowed skeleton, and this is how it runs.
The Code-Review-Simplify loop has no natural end - an agent will polish forever if you let it. The four breakout constraints I arm around the loop, and how I match the exit to the risk of the work package.
The scariest agent mistake is not the invented method that errors on first run - it is the polished code that passes. Simon Willison's argument about hallucinations, and the four failure patterns I review for.
Validation traces every requirement to its implementation and every implementation back to a requirement - gap analysis, the traceability matrix, holdout scenarios the agent never sees, and the two feedback arrows that make the phase more than an audit.
PREVC's fifth phase is the one most cycles skip - a structured retrospective that turns observations into harness changes, and release documentation that writes the next cycle's requirements before it starts.
Where a five-phase agent workflow actually sits against PDCA, Scrum, waterfall, spec-driven development and the V-Model - one mapping table and five honest comparisons, because a workflow that cannot name its ancestors is hiding something.
The series retrospective - what was borrowed and from whom, what my extensions add and what they cost, the gap between the workflow as described and the runs I can actually evidence, and what I would do differently.
