u/follow_beer

I used up my free GitHub Actions minutes in a few days while testing an agent factory.

I'm building a local workflow runner, so I have a reason for asking. I'm exploring local checks during the edit/test loop, with hosted CI verifying the finished PR.

I still want failures locally to mean the same thing in CI. Dependencies and leftovers from previous runs seem like the tricky part.

For people running coding agents: where do your repeated checks run? Have ordinary scripts been enough, or have you needed a self-hosted runner or a clean container per task?

Spent two hours installing a tool to make my coding agent smarter. Then it refused to use it.

The tool let the agent read code like an IDE: jump to any symbol, find every caller, no grep. Got it installed, indexed the whole repo, ready to go.

Then I watched the agent ignore it. Asked it to find where a function was used: it ran grep. Pointed it at the tool directly, it used it once, next task went straight back to grep.

The tool was fine. The agent had a habit and my one-line reminder didn't beat it.

So I ripped it out. Native search plus the agent's own file reader - worse on paper, but it actually uses them, beat the better tool it wouldn't touch.

Giving an agent a capability and getting it to use that capability are two different problems. The second one is harder, and it's the one that decides whether any of this works.

Anyone got a coding agent that actually changed its default tool once you handed it a better one? Genuinely asking.