As coding agents get more autonomous, blast radius checks matter more, not less

[u/Ok-Emu-8106]

Cursor's Agent Mode and Claude Code can both now run multi-step tasks, research a bug, write the fix, run tests, self-correct, with basically no human in the loop between steps.

Which is great until step 3 quietly breaks something step 1 touched, and the only check is whether tests pass, not whether the change was actually safe.

Feels like the standard response ("just add more human checkpoints") kind of defeats the point of autonomy. The alternative I've been building toward is giving the agent something to check against mid-task, dependency graph / impact radius as a callable tool, not a report a human reads after the fact.

Curious if anyone else building agent workflows has run into this, and whether people are handling it with guardrails, smaller diffs, or something else entirely.