Boring on Purpose: Wrapping Coding Agents in NEEDLE's State Machine
The Rabbit Hole Generator gave me NEEDLE this week, and it lands right on a question I keep running into: once you let a coding agent run unattended, who decides whether it actually did the job? Most of the excitement around coding agents is about making them smarter. NEEDLE is interested in something much less glamorous. It assumes the agent is unpredictable, wraps it in a loop where every step around the agent is fixed and logged, and then refuses to take the agent’s word that it finished. I didn’t want to point a real AI model with its permission prompts switched off at anything, so I ran the whole thing against a fake agent: a 20-line shell script that succeeds, fails, hangs, and lies on cue. The lying one turned out to be the most interesting part. ...