When agents become teammates

We onboarded an engineering agent the same way we onboard a new hire: a short brief, access to the repo, and a Slack channel to ask questions in. By lunch it had opened three pull requests, two of which merged without changes.

What made it feel less like a tool and more like a teammate wasn't the output. It was that it asked a clarifying question before touching the riskiest file in the repo — the same thing a careful new engineer would do.