Lauren Tan’s pstack: verify first, then parallelize
The most critical skill to have in your toolbox is a high quality verification skill.
Go faster with parallelism with Cloud Agents instead of worktrees
— Lauren Tan · Source: The Complete Guide to pstack Pt. 1; further reading: Pt. 2, Loops You Can Trust; pstack Cursor plugin
She emphasizes the importance of verification, and why she uses Cloud Agents to parallelize development rather than git worktrees. (X really isn’t a good place to publish or read articles.) In principle, these agentic development skills should be built into the harness; there shouldn’t be a need to install them separately.
The art of supervising someone smarter than you
One technique I like to use is the indirect prompt. Instead of telling the agent exactly what I want, I try to draw it out of the agent instead - in its own words.
This accomplishes three things:
First, it forces the agent to compress a noisy conversation into a structured problem statement. Second, it lets me catch misunderstandings immediately. If the agent fixates on a red herring in the thread, I can correct it quickly before it starts writing any code.
And third, I haven’t potentially led it down the wrong path by stating my own assumptions and hypotheses which could be incorrect or limit what the agent could otherwise achieve.
— Lauren Tan · The Complete Guide to pstack Pt. 2
This is great advice: don’t rush to give instructions; first assess the agent’s understanding of the problem.