Claude Code and Opus 4.5 have recently made meaningful strides in raising the bar on agentic development. However, I’ve discovered that when you treat the agents more as teammates and less as automatons they really excel.
Let me explain.
Claude Code’s GitHub integration finally lets me manage agents the way a great CTO manages developers: with clear objectives, structured workflows, nuanced guardrails, and most importantly, stable context.
I start every project in Claude Code's planning mode now. The agents and I work together to draft comprehensive plans. I review. We iterate. Then, and this is the key, we instantiate those plans as GitHub epics.
Each epic becomes a container for related issues. Each issue becomes a discrete task with clear objectives, architectural guidelines, and acceptance criteria. The agents work methodically through the issues and submit PRs when done. They even check each other’s work, just like a human team would.
Because Claude Code maintains context through these epics, we’re no longer fighting context window exhaustion. A three-week project stays coherent from day one to deployment. The agents can see the overall arc of the project at any time, track progress, and recall the architectural decisions from week one as they implement features in week three.
The results have been striking. Code quality has improved markedly. The agents are producing more consistent, better-structured code that actually follows our established patterns. Error rates have dropped to levels I’d expect from more senior developers, not the interns agents sometimes seem to channel. And if they stray, I just ask them to revisit the epic and validate whether they’ve delivered against the requirements. They usually course-correct.
With a growing level of comfort, I’m now starting to let the agents monitor GitHub on their own and select their own epics to work on, updating the underlying GitHub issues as they make progress.
They’re not just executing rote tasks anymore—they’re participating in overall project management.
Great tech leaders don’t micromanage. They set clear objectives, establish workflows, remove blockers, and trust their teams to deliver. That’s precisely what I’m doing with my agent teammates now. I’m just applying decades of engineering management wisdom to a new kind of hybrid team. And it’s working.
Carpe Agentem. 🎯
#AgenticDevelopment #GitHubIntegration #ClaudeCode #EngineeringManagement #AI #FutureOfWork