Local coding agents are good now, but only if you babysit them

Local coding agents are finally useful for me, but I still can’t just leave them alone.

They are great for small fixes, reading a repo, changing files, and doing boring code work. But if I give them too much freedom, they start touching random stuff, making nice looking broken code, or going way too far from the original task.

The workflow that works best for me is basically:

small task
run tests
check diff
fix the weird part
repeat

So yeah, they save time, but your still sitting there like a tired manager with git diff open.

Is that how you guys use them too, or did someone actually get a local coding agent to work alone without breaking stuff alot? I dont know if my setup is bad or this is just the current state.