Break development work into phases for Copilot

The poster splits work into phases with explicit tasks so Copilot's agent works through development steps instead of everything at once.

What They Did

The poster breaks a feature into explicit phases in a quick note, such as building the API, wiring middleware, and adding rate limits. For each phase they run a planning task in parallel with Traycer to get file-level changes, review and edit that plan line by line, then hand the approved plan to Copilot using Sonnet 4 to write the code instead of letting it decide architecture end to end.

How It Went

They say this gets about 90% of the work done and produces clean code most of the time, while making review easier and limiting random codebase changes. The stated downside is that blind end-to-end agent runs waste time with wrong designs, and the planning step is less useful for very small tasks.

Worth Knowing

Their main concrete catch is cost: they cite Copilot with Sonnet 4 at about $10 for roughly 300 requests.