2 min lesson
Teach the tradeoffs, not just the magic
For each case in "Teach the tradeoffs, not just the magic", name the signal and the response you would use.
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Teach the tradeoffs, not just the magic
The interesting DX conversation is where the human stays in the loop. More autonomy buys throughput and costs oversight and a credible teacher names that tension instead of selling pure automation.
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
The decision isn't trusting the agent more - it's choosing tasks where verification is cheap.
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Full explanation
This is the emerging edge the JD asks you to explore
Cloud AgentsAgents that run in a Cursor-managed virtual machine, check out the repo, do the work and open a pull request, then shut down, with no load on your laptop. Press Enter for the full definition. are exactly the "fringe of coding agents" a DX Engineer is hired to probe and explain. The high-value artifact isn't "look, it ran unattended." It's a clear-eyed account of when you'd hand a task to a Cloud Agent, what review gate you'd keep and where you decided the autonomy wasn't worth the loss of oversight.
I'd hand a Cloud Agent the dependency upgrade because it's long, mechanical and easy to verify with the test suite as the gate. I'd keep the human in the loop on anything touching auth or migrations, where a wrong autonomous step is expensive to unwind. The skill isn't trusting the agent more; it's choosing tasks where verification is cheap.
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Optional practice