Cafe(s) and the Context You Can't Write Down

CAFE(S) is a framework, published by a group of researchers that includes DORA co-creator Nicole Forsgren, for judging the context handed to a coding agent. MetalBear's article applying it argues that agent context has two kinds of source: decisions and constraints that only people know need documentation, while current service responses and integration behavior can be observed directly.

MetalBear presents its mirrord development tool as a way to provide that second kind of context. The code an agent is working on runs against the real services in a staging cluster, so the agent sees actual responses instead of relying on documents that need ongoing maintenance. This is a vendor's engineering rationale, rather than a measured comparison of agent success rates.