Day 20 of the 100 Days Agentic Engineer Challenge: Coding Agent Rules

Yesterday I found out that the Roo Cline Coding Agent in combination with Github Copilot Pro plan offers unlimited use of Claude Sonnet 3.5 for the very low monthly amount that is $10. There is only one catch, if you set your agent to auto-approve reads and edits, you may encounter rate limit exceeded error and the second thing is very difficult to follow what is happening in the app. Let’s look at my daily task routine first.

Daily Tasks Routine

1.Physical activity — I did 25 pushups and did a little work outside with a wheelbarrow, sand and a hammer ;)
2.Seven hours of sleep — I slept pretty late and had to get up at 5am to make milk for my 2 year old daughter, and an hour later she decided that there was no point in sleeping any more, so I had to get up too. Today I go to bed at 11 pm.
3.AI Agents — Testing coding agents and how to work with them efficiently while still understanding what is happening.
4.PAIC: in queue
5.Data Science: in queue

If you want to know what all these tasks are about, read the introduction to the 100 Days Agentic Engineer Challenge.

Working with Coding Agents

The most important thing is to find out what version control they use. The cloud AI app builders have it out of the box and fully automated, but for the agents inside your IDE you need to use git and plan your development. The autonomous feature is nice, but you will quickly lose control over what is happening. Even if you don’t want to follow the code, please follow the instructions written by the agents, very often the user request can be too general, then you get errors and the only solution is to write additional instructions like “Try to break the task into smaller steps”.

Another problem you can encounter are rate limits, if you are using Claude Sonnet directly, depending on the tier you are in, you can get different limits: hourly token limits or daily limits. If you use the free plan of Github Copilot, you have 2000 completions per month, but even for the paid Pro version you can get rate limit exceeded error, as I already mentioned. I think the coding agents are not yet ready for autonomous mode, at least if you want to run it at the lowest possible cost.