← All IntelClip / OtherSpecs and quality criteria before agentic coding
From Guide, Verify, Solve — Anirban Chatterjee, Sonar · ≈16:08
“You have to manage the context window of the agent you can't just throw your entire code base at the agent up front.”
“It's going to spend a lot of time thrashing and exploring and burning tokens while it's doing it.”
“This is being enabled by Sonar Vortex as of this week.”
What’s in it
- Shows how to write specs and quality gates before turning agents loose
- Explains why dumping the whole codebase into an agent wastes tokens
- Introduces Sonar Vortex's real-time in-loop verification for coding agents
Clip transcript
develop code. Before you start either of those loops though, it is really important to have a sense of the specifications of what you actually are going to want to accomplish with the software that's being written. This is This is your architectural constraints. This is the way your desired architecture for the software. This is your coding standards and your coding patterns that are acceptable. These are the list of dependencies that you are and are not allowed to use. These are your coding standards and and syntax standards that you obey in your organization. This could be your your logging practices or your observability and tracing practices. All of that goes into your specs and then you also need to define what your quality criteria are, right? And we have quality criteria that we ship with that you can use by default or you can adjust them as it makes sense for your organization, but this is like what are the levels of security, of quality, of maintainability that you're willing to accept in your code that you're pushing into production. You need to basically write that down and encode it. And now you're ready to start using LLM coding agents to write code. And whenever you're initiating a coding task with an with an with an agent, one of the first things that we can help is providing context and constraints so that the agent starts from the ground floor with an understanding of the code base and the guardrails that is relevant to it in that moment. You have to manage the context window of the agent you can't just throw your entire code base at the agent up front. It's going to spend a lot of time thrashing and exploring and burning tokens while it's doing it. We are able to efficiently provide just the context that it needs based on the work that it's being given so that it can get to work writing productive code very quickly. It then generates the source code as you can see and we also provide in loop verification to the agent as it's writing. It can call in to us and provide and get a list of issues that we are finding in real time in the code that's being written and the great thing about that is those issues can then be fixed immediately by the agent so they don't propagate into future agentic loops that are going to run in order to fully build out the software project that you're doing. This is being enabled by Sonar Vortex as of this week.
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