The 'Blast Radius' Rule: How to Decide What AI Coding Agents Should Handle Alone

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A developer writing for DEV Community outlines a practical framework for delegating tasks to AI coding agents based on how reversible their failures are. The core idea divides work into zones: fully reversible changes like UI and copy are safe for agents to handle independently, while silent failure-prone configs like cache headers and robots.txt require human verification. A third zone covers irreversible actions — DNS records, app store listings, secrets, and anything referencing live external URLs — which the author never delegates regardless of the agent's competence. The author learned this after an AI-generated Cloudflare cache rule produced a malformed HTTP response that looked correct in the diff but was only caught by manually inspecting live traffic. The proposed fix is to encode these constraints directly in the repository, using comments and build-time checks so both future humans and AI agents inherit the context automatically.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

GEO Optimisation Builds on SEO Foundations, Not a Replacement for Them

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