Twin-run spike: testing whether a task suits an AI agent in 90 minutes
A DEV Community post proposes a 90-minute protocol to judge whether a coding task is suitable for an AI agent, by running two independent agent attempts from the same base commit. The core idea is that if the two runs diverge sharply, the weakness lies in the task description rather than the model. The method compares which code regions each run changes using a hunk-overlap score, and gates the outcome on whether both branches pass the existing test suite. A decision table maps overlap and test results to actions such as shipping, narrowing the task, or killing it. The author also advises recording token usage and hunks produced per run, and warns about pitfalls like shared base drift, passing tests that hide wrong fixes, and mid-run prompt edits.
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