Agents on the Night Shift
Background coding agents can work while a team sleeps. The question is what they should be allowed to do, and what has to be on the table when people arrive in the morning. Each episode of this four-part series follows one night at Keurbooms Software, a fictional Plettenberg Bay company whose nine-person team runs Lagoonbook, a booking and payments platform for guesthouses and tour operators. Episode 1 starts with the ideal night-shift task, removing stale feature flags, and the evidence pack every change must carry. Episode 2 covers the night an agent turned a vague scalability request into a split into services, and the operational bill that came with it. Episode 3 follows a dependency upgrade that passed every test and still changed behaviour. Episode 4 sets out the charter the team wrote as a result: task classes, evidence, budgets, merge authority and a kill switch. The company, people, systems and figures are fictional and illustrative.
4 articles
- Part 1Let the agents take the night shift. Make them bring evidence.Background coding agents can do useful work while a team sleeps, but only if the work is small, reversible and arrives with proof. Part 1 of Agents on the Night Shift follows a fictional software team's first night of agent-driven cleanup and the evidence pack that decided what was merged.9 min read
- Part 2The night the agent split everything into servicesAn agent asked to improve scalability overnight produced a clean, passing pull request that turned a modular monolith into four services. Part 2 of Agents on the Night Shift follows the morning review that found the operational bill, and the rule that now keeps architecture decisions off the night list.9 min read
- Part 3The overnight upgrade that passed every testA routine dependency upgrade opened by a background agent passed every test, then made a few invoices disagree with what guests had actually been charged. Part 3 of Agents on the Night Shift follows how a fictional team caught a one-cent difference before any invoice went out, and the upgrade rules the night shift now follows.9 min read
- Part 4What the night shift is allowed to mergeAfter six weeks of background coding agents, a fictional software team wrote down the rules: which tasks are allowed at night, which need an approver, which never run unattended, and how a task class moves to a less restrictive class or back to a stricter one. Part 4 of Agents on the Night Shift sets out the charter and a checklist you can adapt.10 min read
Working through any of this in your own organisation?
These articles come out of delivery work rather than theory. If the problems in this series look familiar, a short scoping conversation is usually the quickest way to work out what is worth doing first.
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