Don't Be Passive Aggressive With Your Agents (and Coding Agent Report Link)
Treat your coding agents as adaptable collaborators—communicate clearly, value efficiency over endurance, match tools to your workflow, skip unnecessary formality, rethink technical debt, and document your development rules for best results.
Agents are things you assign tasks to. Compliant, infinitely patient knowledge workers. There are moments of brilliance, moments of shocking stupidity, and moments where I suspect them of malicious compliance—just trying to thwart me by doing exactly what I'm telling them to do.
Who should you hire?
We've reviewed 15 agents in detail to help you figure out which one of them are worth looking at, what a relationship with them would be like, and what sort of joy you would experience working with them.
Download the full Coding Agent Report PDF
See the full open-source evaluation and code on GitHub:
https://github.com/The-Focus-AI/june-2025-coding-agent-report
(Full post originally published at https://thefocus.ai/posts/dont-be-passive-aggressive)
Don’t Be Passive Aggressive With Your Agents
1. Communicate Clearly, Not Aggressively
When agents go off rails, resist writing in ALL CAPS. Instead:
- Step back and take a breath
- Roll back to previous checkpoint
- Adjust prompt with more context
- Ask agent to review existing code first
2. Speed > Endurance
“Claude ran for 7 hours” isn’t impressive—it’s concerning. Jules completing tasks in 6 minutes vs Copilot taking 30 minutes doesn’t mean 5x better results, it means 5x smarter execution.
3. Match Your Development Lifecycle
- One-off script? Use dynamic typing, inline everything
- Production system? More ceremony and structure needed
- Different tools for different contexts
4. Drop Unnecessary Ceremony
Agents often over-engineer. Push back on:
- Complex build systems for simple scripts
- Modular file structures when inline works
- Enterprise patterns for MVPs
- Remember: future you will use agents to clean up technical debt
5. Technical Debt Is Different Now
With agents reducing the cost of refactoring, yesterday’s technical debt becomes more manageable. The economics of code maintenance have fundamentally shifted.
6. Rules-Driven Development
Document development practices in your repo:
- Cursor: .rules directory
- Claude: CLAUDE.md files
- Copilot: GitHub integration rules
These guide agent behavior across runs.
Read the full report and see all agent reviews:
https://github.com/The-Focus-AI/june-2025-coding-agent-report