The engineers who handle change best aren't keeping up with every tool
Hywel Carter on the mental model that travels with you no matter what ships next.
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Agent Hooks + Chunk sidecars: Stop Broken AI Code Before It Hits CI
AI agents write code fast, but the feedback loop usually can't keep up. In this tutorial, you'll see how to wire Chunk sidecars into your agent's hooks so basic failures get caught before they ever reach your CI pipeline. We'll walk through the two hooks that chunk init writes automatically: Both hooks return exit 2 on failure, blocking the commit or keeping the turn open so the agent can fix its own mistakes with no manual prompting required.
Agentic validation needs different infrastructure
Previously, I described some core approaches to validating agent written code: feedforward and feedback techniques. Feedforward techniques are about avoiding errors up front, for example by coming up with better prompts and planning strategies. Feedback gives agents a signal that they have actually achieved a task. Feedback is a key part of common agentic patterns like Ralph loops or the /goal commands in Codex and Claude Code: keep working until some known condition passes.
How to set up blue-green deployments with CircleCI
How to set up blue-green deployments with CircleCI.
Chunk sidecars: CI Feedback Before the Push
Chunk sidecars give your agent CI-grade feedback in seconds. No push, no pipeline wait. Catch failures and fix them while the agent is still in context.
The skill gap AI can't close, with Hywel Carver of Skiller Whale
If 90% of code is now AI-generated, what happens to the engineers who never had to write it themselves? The ability to review code well, to catch what the LLM missed, depends on mental models that only come from practice. That tension sits at the center of this conversation.
Run CI Tests Without Pushing: Microbuilds with Chunk sidecars
AI coding agents write code faster than your pipeline can catch mistakes. What if the agent could validate against CI before you ever push? In this 5-minute demo, we set up CircleCI's Chunk CLI and run a microbuild using Chunk sidecars, secure Linux microVMs that spin up in ~1 second in your CircleCI account, mirror your working directory (no git push required), and give your agent CI-grade feedback while it's still in context.
Patterns of validation
This post covers some techniques to get agents to validate their work. We’ll cover why this is important, a variety of types of checks you can employ, and mechanisms you can use to enforce them.