20 sessions on pnpm with a coding agent: the agent failed at least once in 7, and 10 finished without a human stepping in.
Takeaway: Next time I'd tell the agent upfront to inspect the actual extracted source tree before writing a patch, since guessing at line numbers from a stale copy wasted two build cycles.
Takeaway: Next time I'd point straight at the file using beautiful-mermaid instead of just saying 'fix pnpm check:web' — the agent spent a lot of turns reading through MarkdownRenderer.svelte before it found the real issue, that the code was written for classic mermaid.js but imported a completely different library.
Takeaway: Next time I'd ask upfront for the revert plus a rebuild/lint check in one go, since resolving the three-way conflicts in package.json, the lockfile and the component took most of the turns.
Takeaway: Next time I'd start by asking the agent to scan all package configs at once instead of going file by file, since the bin/bridge/svelte tsconfigs and vite configs kept drifting out of sync with each other.
Takeaway: Next time I'd point directly at the CSS variables involved (--tool-output-bg, --shiki-dark-bg) since the agent had to spend a lot of turns grepping through multiple components to find the source of the color mismatch.
Takeaway: Next time I'd describe the corner/divider interaction more precisely upfront — screenshots after each change helped catch when the agent's approach (adding radius to the whole sidebar) visually broke things.
Takeaway: Next time I'd ask upfront for click-outside-to-close behavior along with the lightbox feature, since it's an obvious pairing.
Takeaway: Next time I'd describe the exact final look I want (no border, transparent by default, hover background) in one prompt instead of iterating three times.
Takeaway: Next time I'd start the prompt by naming the exact package to delete (packages/web) since the agent had to spend a lot of turns just grepping the whole repo to figure out where Vue was referenced.
Takeaway: Next time I'd be more specific upfront about exactly which padding/corners to change and preview before committing, since I ended up reverting two of the four style tweaks.
Takeaway: Next time I'd point straight at the @pierre/diffs type declarations instead of letting the agent search node_modules from scratch through several pnpm-hashed paths.
Takeaway: Next time I'd include a screenshot of the desired banner layout up front, since the first pass removed the right text but left an alignment issue I had to flag separately.
Takeaway: This was a one-line constant change, so I could have just asked for the exact constant name if I'd known it, but letting the agent grep for it first was fine too.
Takeaway: I would have started by pointing at the exact CSS classes and values I wanted instead of iterating turn by turn (10px, then 4px, then 0px) — that wasted a couple of build cycles.
Takeaway: Next time I'd specify upfront that packages should use package-name imports (not relative paths) and that internal packages must stay private, since that's exactly what I ended up correcting twice.
Takeaway: Next time I'd ask directly for the root cause investigation across the transcript rendering pipeline instead of just reporting the visual bug, since the fix ended up touching several files (Vue component, transcript utils, bridge types).
Takeaway: Next time I'd attach the screenshot and explicitly describe what looks wrong (e.g.