You can get a lot done with agentic programming without going "all in" on a gastown-like system, but I think there is a minimum viable setup:

1. an adversarial agent harness that uses one agent to create a plan and implement it, and another to review the plan and code-review each step.

2. an agentic validation suite -- a more flexible take on e2e testing.

3. some custom skills that explain how to use both of those flows.

With this in place you can formulate ideas in a chat session, produce planning artifacts, then use the adversarial system to implement the plans and the validation layer to get everything working e2e for human review.

There are a lot of tools you can use for these things but I chose to just build the tooling in the repo as I go.

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Schiendelman 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Claude already creates multiple agents for some projects just to keep context windows smaller. I don't think it'll be long before they offer a testing agent along with their planning agent.

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encoderer 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I prefer having codex author plans and implement, and claude play reviwer. I do swap them from time to time and i have a lot of respect for claude 4.6 and 4.7 but for my domain I think codex does a better job with the authoring.

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Schiendelman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a cool idea! Plus I bet you can stay in lower tiers with both?

	▲	encoderer 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're definitely burning more tokens with the back/forth and multi-step approach but assuming you swap who does the authoring from time to time you can definitely get the max out of each plan. Review doesn't use as many tokens.