/ Developer / Giving agents freedom without giving away control

Giving agents freedom without giving away control

Code Quality Team
Code Quality Team Oct 27, 2026 / 56 min read

Episode 8

Link: https://thenextcommit.substack.com/p/episode-eight-simon-vane?r=8wn8uy

What gives a coding agent a dependable platform to work on? Simon Vane, Staff Engineer at M-KOPA, connects code quality with the engineering discipline around it. He describes how established pipelines and quality gates supported faster delivery, why he still asks agents to refactor, and how he adapted test-driven development when he stopped writing most of the code himself.

Simon and Tom previously worked together using Extreme Programming, TDD and pair programming. Their conversation explores which benefits of those practices can move into agent instructions and automated verification, and which need renewed attention from people. We discuss maintained journey documents across microservices, context-rich AI reviewers and the tension between small changes and constant review interruptions. Simon also reflects on what he misses from pairing: seeing how colleagues work and learning from their decisions. Faster implementation creates opportunities, but review, maintenance and shared understanding still have costs.

About Simon

Simon Vane is a Staff Engineer at M-KOPA, a fintech serving underbanked customers across Africa. He has 30 years of experience with Microsoft technology, including a decade specialising in event-driven distributed systems in Azure. Shaped by Extreme Programming, Agile and DevOps, he helps engineers use AI across the development lifecycle while maintaining quality. His current work includes guiding coding agents and developing skills to share engineering practices across teams. Biography draws on his guest-supplied briefing.

In this episode

  • 02:34: Simon and Tom’s history with pairing, TDD and quality
  • 03:52: M-KOPA and Simon’s engineering context
  • 07:05: The current coding setup and adoption of Claude Code
  • 08:24: Problem discovery and using an agent as a peer architect
  • 10:47: Temporary design documents and maintained journey documents
  • 14:20: Breaking designs into work while preserving team understanding
  • 16:44: Faster delivery, silos and understanding unfamiliar code
  • 19:41: The foundations already in place before agents accelerated delivery
  • 21:04: Planning work and adapting TDD to coding agents
  • 25:03: Exploring specification-driven development
  • 26:37: Why better-designed code helps agents make changes
  • 30:50: AI reviewers, human review and the cost of interruptions
  • 34:08: Tests, mutation testing and static analysis
  • 37:46: Training, knowledge sharing and local innovation
  • 39:17: A team’s automated incident-triage example
  • 40:55: Prioritisation when implementation feels cheap
  • 43:53: Start small and make learning from colleagues intentional

Key ideas

  • Simon believes established pipelines and automated gates reduced the risks of accelerating delivery with agents.
  • He observes better results when agents work on well-designed code, and continues to challenge design and request refactoring.
  • Persistent TDD instructions made his personal workflow more practical, while he still checks the evidence of the failing test and its reason.
  • Maintained journey documents help engineers and agents understand behaviour spanning several services.
  • Teams use contextual AI reviews before required human review, but review capacity remains an unresolved constraint.
  • Small pull requests can be easier to understand while a frequent stream of reviews creates interruptions; teams need to find a workable balance.
  • Agent-assisted code comprehension may reduce some costs of silos, but Simon still misses the informal learning provided by pairing.
  • Quick implementation retains maintenance and review costs, making prioritisation consequential.


People and links

  • M-KOPA
  • Simon invites listeners to connect on LinkedIn. His preferred profile URL is not supplied; add it during guest review.

Tools mentioned