Treat the agent as a senior peer

The most useful framing I've found: the agent is a capable, senior colleague, not an oracle and not a junior to micromanage.

Why it matters

If you treat it as an oracle, you stop checking its work and ship its mistakes. If you treat it as a junior, you spell out every step and lose the leverage. The senior-peer framing keeps you in the right posture: delegate the path, stay accountable for the outcome.

What it looks like in practice

• Give it the goal and the constraints, not the keystrokes. A peer figures out the how. Spell out success criteria instead.
• Expect it to push back. Ask for tradeoffs and disagreement. If it only ever agrees, you're prompting it wrong.
• Verify, don't trust. Senior peers are still wrong sometimes. Run the code, read the diff, check the claim.
• Let it run when the path is clear. Don't interrupt good momentum to confirm obvious steps.

The trap

The failure mode is drifting between the two bad poles: rubber-stamping output when you're busy, then over-controlling when you get burned. Hold the peer framing steady and the quality stays predictable.