Recovery work
Partial or failed runs can turn into manual cleanup and repeated steps.
For AI-native development agencies
Let agents move fast.
Don't make the client repo the experiment.
When coding agents work across billable client projects, a bad run costs more than tokens. It consumes senior review time, delivery margin, deadline slack and sometimes client confidence.
Keep your current agentBounded first workflowExact human acceptanceRecovery evidence
Where margin leaks
Generating code is cheap. Reconstructing a bad run is not.
Review burden
Senior engineers still need to establish what exact candidate is safe enough to keep.
Client trust
On client-owned repositories, “the agent said it worked” is not evidence.
Working contract
Candidate work is not accepted work.
StateHinge keeps those two states separate. The candidate gets checked. A human sees the exact change. Only an accepted candidate can cross into accepted project state.
Design-partner fit
One real workflow, one bounded repo, one measurable review or recovery problem.
We want teams already using coding agents weekly or daily. The question is practical: does this boundary save enough senior engineering time to be worth keeping?