That work has to happen somewhere the agent can read the result and react. Otherwise the agent ships five iterations of the same broken pattern because nothing in the loop is telling it to stop.
The rough edge I keep getting stuck on
CI earned its trust by being hermetic. A fresh container, pinned versions, a known cache. If you take those checks out of CI and run them inside the agent's session on a developer laptop, you get the problem CI was invented to solve. "It passed for me." "It linted on my branch." The agent loop has to inherit the hermeticity the pipeline had. Otherwise you are not shortening the loop, you are hiding the noise inside it.
There is a second cost nobody loves to talk about. Every check you pull in costs latency in the inner loop. If lint, tests and a policy engine each take a couple of seconds, the agent's quick turn is no longer quick. Some of that is fine. Some of it will quietly motivate engineers to disable the slow checks locally, just to keep the agent feeling responsive, and now your floor is lower than the one CI was holding.
Where I land on it
I am with the piece. Waiting on pull-request-stage CI to surface a brace problem in agent-authored code is a workflow I cannot defend on a Tuesday afternoon. Move the cheap, deterministic checks in. Lint. Unit tests for touched files. The license check that already runs in under a second. Let the agent see the result and try again before it asks for human attention.
Keep the expensive, environment-sensitive checks where they have always belonged. Integration tests with real services. Build provenance. The SCA scan that wants a fresh container and a stable mirror. The outer loop is not going away. It is going to become the layer that confirms what the inner loop already believes.
What I am watching next
Two things. First, whether the tools that already live in the inner loop (formatters, language servers, pre-commit) get a serious agent-readable mode, with structured output the agent can parse instead of a wall of stderr. The signal needs to be machine-shaped now, because the consumer is. Second, what happens to the CI job that is, in practice, "wait for lint". A lot of pipelines have one of those. When it goes, the rest of the pipeline gets to be about the things only CI can do, and that is the version of this story I want to read in six months.