Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Why dependency upgrades are the first job to give an agent If you are going to let a coding agent loose on a repository unsupervised, dependency upgrades are the place to start. Not because they are trivial, but because they have three properties most engineering work lacks. They are bounded: the change is "move package X from version A to version B", and everything else in the diff follows from that one decision. They are testable: if the suite passed before the bump and passes after, you have real evidence, and if it fails, the failure points at the cause. And they are reversible: a bad bump is undone by reverting one merge commit, provided your lockfile is committed and your install is reproducible. Dependency work is the rare case where the agent's strengths (patience, tirelessness…
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