I see this complaint frequently about losing track of what the agents are doing, and I agree you do need to understand your system. But there seems to be this baked in assumption that if you lose track, you now need to manually wade through this massive mess to untangle it and maybe that is impossible. I don't agree.

If you don't understand the codebase, ask the agent to explain it to you. I'm not not kidding. Modern frontier models are fantastic as this - even more so than actually writing the code. It can tell you in words. It can generate architectural diagrams and sequence diagrams. It can write tests and scripts that prove it's assumptions. It can happily refactor so that the system design is aligned with your preferences.

Once you accept this, you can stop worrying so much about it and instead focusing on building the architectures and tools that lets the agents succeed better and faster - so called closed loops or agents prompting agents. Build systems that are more easily verifiable and deterministic so the agent can write very powerful property based tests. Focus more on what and why you are building, how to make sure all external properties are verifiable and leave the internals to the agents. The code is not really for us anymore.

My experience is this is great when the model surfaces something to you. But I'm constantly caught off-guard by things the model didn't volunteer, things I would have quickly stumbled upon if I was working on code the traditional way. The model didn't think it was relevant but I sure do.