Developer finds critical agentic workflow bugs only visible at runtime, not in code

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A developer building ArDD, a structured AI coding tool that breaks projects into plans and tasks for Claude Code agents, discovered significant flaws only after running live smoke tests rather than relying on code review. A key bug revealed that delegated git worktrees branched from the remote tracking branch instead of local HEAD, meaning locally committed state was invisible to subagents. A separate, unexplained issue caused git worktrees to corrupt the primary checkout's configuration by flipping core.bare to true. The developer responded with a mandatory alignment script for subagents and a coordinator-level tripwire to detect the config corruption, while acknowledging neither was a true fix. The experience prompted a broader architectural redesign so that coordinating state only lands on the main branch alongside the code it describes, ensuring failed runs leave no partial state behind.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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