Closing the Agentic Loop: Getting Agents to Safely Build, Verify, and Ship

Agents can write code. That's not the hard part anymore. The hard part is trusting what they ship. In this hands-on workshop, I'll show you the loop I run every day: agents safely build, verify, and deploy the outcomes I want, and that loop is hooked up to signal (my own ideas, user feedback, bug reports, and friction) so it keeps itself going. I haven't read 1% of the code in my product, and agents author and merge most of the PRs. That only works because of the system around them.

We'll start by running autopilot (npx kcd-skills@latest autopilot) on a real repo, yours if you want, and use the questions it asks to lay the foundation: invariants, decision records that say when it's OK to change them, a primitives catalog, and an AGENTS.md that's a router, not a novel. Then we'll get into verification. That means separate reviewer agents, PR templates that have you review systems instead of code, cloud agents with their own computers that show their work, and a control CLI your agents maintain for themselves. Finally, we'll limit the blast radius with feature flags, health checks, and backups you've actually restored, and wire up the loops that keep it all moving. Bring a laptop and a repo you own.

What you'll walk away with:

• An autopilot plan for your own repo, with each step your agents can take on next
• A primitives catalog and invariants your agents actually follow
• A PR template built around intent, one-way vs. two-way doors, and system diagrams, so you review systems instead of code
• A verification setup: an AI reviewer, agents that test the running app, and a control CLI they maintain
• A blast-radius checklist: flags with an owner, a metric, and a removal condition, health checks after deploy, and tested restores
• The loops that keep it going: bug reports, user feedback, friction, and nightly cleanup

Prerequisites: nothing to install ahead of time, but a good internet connection matters. To follow along on your own code, bring a laptop with a coding agent you already use (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc.) signed in, plus a GitHub repo you own and can open pull requests on.