Are you talking about the same thing as the OP?
I mean, the parent even pointed out that it works for vibe coding and stuff you don't care about; ...but the 'You can't' refers to this question by the OP:
> I really need to approve every single edit and keep an eye on it at ALL TIMES, otherwise it goes haywire very very fast! How are people using auto-edits and these kind of higher-level abstraction?
No one I've spoken to is just sitting back writing tickets while agents do all the work. If it was that easy to be that successful, everyone would be doing it. Everyone would be talking about it.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying that you can't use agents to modify existing code. You can. I do; lots of people do. ...but that's using it like you see in all the demos and videos; at a code level, in an editor, while editing and working on the code yourself.
I'm specifically addressing the OPs question:
Can you use unsupervised agents, where you don't interact at a 'code' level, only at a high level abstraction level?
...and, I don't think you can. I don't believe anyone is doing this. I don't believe I've seen any real stories of people doing this successfully.
> Can you use unsupervised agents, where you don't interact at a 'code' level, only at a high level abstraction level?
My view, after having gone all-in with Claude Code (almost only Opus) for the last four weeks, is ”no”. You really can’t. The review process needs to be diligent and all-encompassing and is, quite frankly, exhausting.
One improvement I have made to my process for this is to spin up a new Claude Code instance (or clear context) and ask for a code review based on the diff of all changes. My prompt for this is carefully structured. Some issues it identifies can be fixed with the agent, but others need my involvement. It doesn’t eliminate the need to review everything, but it does help focus some of my efforts.