How to set up a project to let agents validate work

Agents are most useful when they can actually use your app to validate their work. I'll show you how to make it easy for them

The biggest benefits of agentic software engineering are hidden behind one key challenge.

Your agents have to be able to validate their own work.

Agents aren’t super useful without being able to close the feedback loop on their work. They’ll write code, but then you have to poke around your app and paste any feedback. It’s a waste of time.

But that’s how software is made. You write some code. You run some tests. You iterate.

You wouldn’t write and ship code without trying to validate that it works, and you shouldn’t do it with agents either.

But your agents should actually be able to run tests, and ideally, use the app.

Why many projects fall short

Closing the feedback loop is often done in two ways:

• Running tests (like unit tests)

• Performing actions against your application

For an API, performing actions might be making API calls. Maybe it’s automated, maybe it’s Postman/cURL.

But for web apps or mobile apps, it gets more complicated. For DeepFocusTimer, I run a development server, visit the app in my browser, and manually validate changes. Most apps, it’s a bit of both.

So most of the time, agents need to be able to:

• Run tests

• Manually use the app

The first of these is easy. Agents can often figure out how to run tests, but apps that have explicit instructions on how to run tests in their AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md get better results.

A prompt to get your project ready for agent-validation

You can fix all of the above problems manually, but I have a prompt that I’ve been using to fix all my projects. Here it is: