I really like the idea of agent coding patterns. This feels like it could be expanded easily with more content though. Off the top of my head:

- tell the agent to write a plan, review the plan, tell the agent to implement the plan

- allow the agent to “self discover” the test harness (eg. “Validate this c compiler against gcc”)

- queue a bunch of tasks with // todo … and yolo “fix all the todo tasks”

- validate against a known output (“translate this to rust and ensure it emits the same byte or byte output as you go”)

- pick a suitable language for the task (“go is best for this task because I tried several languages and it did the best for this domain in go”)

This sort of thing is available using utilities like spec kit/spec kitty/etc. But yes it does make it do better, including writing its own checklists so that it comes back to the tasks it identified early on without distraction.