Introduction to Efficient Output Review
Coding agents can produce an incredible amount of content in a short span, creating new features, reviewing production logs, or fixing bug reports. However, the bottleneck in software engineering and data science has moved from developing code to reviewing what the coding agents are building.
Meanwhile, optimizing output reviewing is crucial for efficient engineering. Therefore, in this article, we will explore how to review the output of coding agents more efficiently.
Why Optimize Output Reviewing
Just a few years ago, the biggest bottleneck was writing code to produce results. Now, however, producing code is not the bottleneck anymore. Thus, engineers are always striving to identify and minimize bottlenecks, and we move on to the next bottleneck, which is reviewing the output of coding agents.
Additionally, coding agents can be used for every task, not only programming tasks but also commercial work, making presentations, reviewing logs, and everything in between. For example, you can use coding agents to generate emails, review production logs, and create reports.
Techniques to Review Output
The review technique varies by task, but some specific examples include:
- Reviewing code: Setting up a custom code review skill and having an OpenClaw agent automatically run this skill whenever you’re tagged in a pull request.
- Reviewing generated emails: Asking Claude Code to generate an HTML file and opening it in your browser to review formatted content.
- Reviewing production log reports: Having a daily report sent to you, which you can then analyze, and using HTML file formatting to preview the results.
Reviewing Code
To more effectively perform code reviews, you can set up a custom code review skill and have an OpenClaw agent automatically run this skill whenever you’re tagged in a pull request.
Meanwhile, this technique uncovers a lot of issues that could have gotten to production if not detected. Therefore, efficient code reviews are probably one of the most important things companies can focus on now to increase speed.
Reviewing Generated Emails
Another common task is generating emails that you send out through a cold outreach tool or emails to respond to people. However, reviewing this in a text-only interface is not ideal.
Thus, one of the most efficient ways of reviewing generated emails is to ask Claude Code to generate an HTML file and open it in your browser. This allows Claude Code to incredibly quickly generate formatted content, making it super easy for you to review.
Reviewing Production Log Reports
Another very common task is to review production log reports. You can typically run a daily query where you analyze production logs, looking for errors and things you should be aware of.
Meanwhile, reporting services that send alerts on errors are often very noisy, and you end up getting a lot of false alerts. Therefore, instead, you can have a daily report sent to you, which you can then analyze, and use HTML file formatting to preview the results.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve covered some of the specific techniques to review coding agent output. We discussed why it’s so important to optimize reviewing outputs, highlighting how the bottleneck in software engineering has shifted from producing code to analyzing the results of code.
Finally, further improving the way you analyze the output of your coding agents will be incredibly important going forward. We urge you to spend time optimizing this process and thinking about how you can make reviewing coding agent output more efficient.
