Deliberation

Deliberation is the middle step between reading and acting. It is where the agent weighs the options the codebase offers: which change is smallest, which is most consistent, which respects the work already done. Skipping this step is how confident edits go wrong.

Make the reasoning legible. When the agent explains why it chose one approach over another — the tradeoff between a local fix and a shared one, the reason a name was kept, the cost of a migration — it invites correction before the change is made. Reasoning you can read is reasoning you can redirect.

Deliberation also means knowing when not to act. Not every issue is worth fixing in the same pass; some problems are better named and deferred. A deliberate agent can report a finding without forcing a change.

The goal is not to think longer, but to think first. Most costly bugs come from acting before the codebase has been allowed to answer.