Agentic Software Development: A Practical Workflow for Developers

Treat the agent as part of the development loop

Agentic software development is not handing a vague feature request to a model and hoping for a finished product. It is a workflow where an agent can inspect evidence, propose a plan, use bounded tools, and produce a change that a developer can review and validate.

This mirrors good engineering practice. The agent accelerates investigation and execution, while the developer retains responsibility for scope, trade-offs, and acceptance criteria.

Use a five-step loop

A repeatable loop prevents both the developer and the agent from jumping to edits before the problem is understood.

• Inspect: gather the error, affected files, and current Git state.
• Plan: state the intended change and validation before writing.
• Execute: use only the tools and permissions the task needs.
• Review: inspect the diff, tool activity, and unexpected changes.
• Verify: run tests, checks, or a concrete manual validation.

Make the handoff explicit

A good agent response identifies what changed, what it verified, and what remains uncertain. That makes it useful during a pull-request review or a later debugging session, not just at the moment a patch appears.

Truss supports this loop with Chat for questions, Plan for read-only investigation, Agent for permitted execution, durable workspace state, and Git-aware views for review.