https://cognibl.com/blog Guides on running work that people and AI agents share. en Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/where-to-put-a-human-checkpoint https://cognibl.com/blog/where-to-put-a-human-checkpoint Full autonomy is the wrong goal. Let an agent run through reversible steps and stop it before anything that cannot be undone: sending, deleting, charging. Control Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/what-replaces-velocity https://cognibl.com/blog/what-replaces-velocity Story points measured effort, and an agent can emit a hundred in an hour. What survives is verified throughput, first-pass rate and where the time went. Metrics Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/what-is-agents-md https://cognibl.com/blog/what-is-agents-md AGENTS.md is a README for agents: the build commands, conventions and boundaries an agent needs. Over 60,000 repositories ship one. What to put in yours. Standards Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/how-much-agent-work-to-review https://cognibl.com/blog/how-much-agent-work-to-review Reviewing everything stops being possible long before anyone decides to stop. Sampling deliberately, at a rate set by evidence, beats sampling by accident. Review Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/eu-ai-act-logging-for-ai-agents https://cognibl.com/blog/eu-ai-act-logging-for-ai-agents Article 12 has applied to high-risk systems since 2 August 2026. It requires automatic, lifetime event logs, which rules out a self-reported trace. Compliance Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/why-agent-failures-are-context-failures https://cognibl.com/blog/why-agent-failures-are-context-failures Agents rarely fail because the model was not capable. They fail because nobody told them what done meant. The 2026 data now says this out loud. Context Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/what-is-proof-of-work-for-ai-agents https://cognibl.com/blog/what-is-proof-of-work-for-ai-agents Proof of work here has nothing to do with mining. It is the evidence a task carries to show the work was done, and the reason a status can be refused. Proof of work Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/what-is-an-mcp-gateway https://cognibl.com/blog/what-is-an-mcp-gateway An MCP gateway sits between your agents and your MCP servers, minting scoped tokens, enforcing policy and writing the trace. Here is when you need one. MCP Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/measuring-agentic-ai-what-to-instrument https://cognibl.com/blog/measuring-agentic-ai-what-to-instrument Most teams running agents in production have no measurement framework at all. Here is the short list of what to instrument, and what to ignore. Metrics Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/giving-an-agent-github-access-safely https://cognibl.com/blog/giving-an-agent-github-access-safely Do not hand an agent your personal access token. Compare deploy keys, fine-grained PATs and GitHub Apps, then scope, stage and log every write it makes. Security Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/first-pass-verification-rate https://cognibl.com/blog/first-pass-verification-rate First-pass verification rate is the share of agent tasks that pass on attempt one. It measures the quality of your specification, not the quality of your agent. Metrics Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/cycle-time-for-agent-work https://cognibl.com/blog/cycle-time-for-agent-work One cycle-time number hides where the time actually went. Split it into spec, build, verify and settle, and the bottleneck in agent work becomes obvious. Metrics Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/cognibl-vs-linear https://cognibl.com/blog/cognibl-vs-linear Linear is faster and better designed than we are, and its workflow is deliberately fixed. The difference is what happens when an agent says a task is done. Comparison Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/cognibl-vs-jira https://cognibl.com/blog/cognibl-vs-jira Jira can gate a transition, through validators. What differs is what gets checked: field input you configure, or evidence against a definition of done. Comparison Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/agent-governance-vs-observability-vs-verification https://cognibl.com/blog/agent-governance-vs-observability-vs-verification Three tools that sound alike and answer different questions: what happened, what is allowed, and whether the work is actually acceptable. Only one gates done. Category Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/definition-of-done-for-ai-agents https://cognibl.com/blog/definition-of-done-for-ai-agents A definition of done written for a person is a reminder. Written for an agent it is a specification, and the difference shows up in your first-pass rate. Definition of done Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://cognibl.com/blog/how-to-verify-ai-agent-work https://cognibl.com/blog/how-to-verify-ai-agent-work Reading every diff does not scale and spot-checking misses what matters. A three-layer method: decide by machine, judge by model, sample by human. Verification Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT