The rate of feedback is an agent's speed limit

An agent’s throughput is capped by how fast its environment tells it the truth. The LLM’s default failure mode is “outrunning your headlights”: emitting a large batch of code and only then running the type-checker or tests, at which point the blast radius of any single error is large and hard to localize¹. The fix is cadence, not more tooling — small deliberate steps where each change is checked before the next begins.

This sharpens the usual “tests matter” argument. Having a test suite lets an agent iterate (see: tests and CI are force multipliers for agent quality); the frequency at which it reads those results sets how fast it can safely go. An agent that checks every edit moves faster than one that dumps a hundred lines and debugs the pile, because the cost of a wrong step scales with how far it traveled before checking. The same logic explains why a local emulator tightens the loop (see: a local cloud emulator tightens the agent feedback loop before deployment) and why specs-to-code loops that re-run blindly degrade the output rather than improve it.