This post analyzes 33 tasks run by MissionControl, an autonomous coding agent, revealing that the #1 failure mode is the AI model overthinking instead of shipping code.
•33 total tasks with 36% raw completion rate (63% adjusted for infrastructure noise), costing $32.93 total
•5 tasks wasted $8.88 with zero commits: Opus read the codebase, planned extensively, then ran out of budget before writing any code
•Opus suits complex modifications to large codebases; Sonnet suits greenfield builds and mechanical fixes with 100% completion on 3 tasks at $0.76 avg
•Three fixes shipped: doubled all budgets (default $5→$10), split code review into two phases (Opus analyzes read-only, Sonnet fixes), and added commit-early guidance to the lead dev prompt
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Two-phase review at $2.50 total already caught real bugs including duplicate accent color logic and a missing style prop that would have shipped to production
This summary was automatically generated by AI based on the original article and may not be fully accurate.
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