Inside an agent-run dev shop: only the hub merges, and every guardrail has a story
Nomadware describes how its agents keep working overnight: sessions that survive reboots, one task per worktree and PR, a merge gate on its own boxes, and a single coordinating session that is the only one allowed to merge.
Source: How an agent-run dev shop actually works — Alex Andronache, Nomadware (DEV Community)
Alex Andronache's write-up of how Nomadware runs is mostly plumbing, which is why it is useful. The morning starts with reading: a PR that landed overnight with before-and-after screenshots of every screen it touched, a Linear issue with a root cause down to file and line, and one agent stopped and waiting on a product question.
The setup that makes that possible is deliberately boring. Each agent session runs as its own systemd unit, so it survives a dropped connection or a reboot, and a session that can't find its transcript refuses to start from scratch. When a plan splits into independent streams, one hub session coordinates and each stream gets its own builder in a separate worktree. Only the hub merges. It reads every PR, lands the ones that pass, and hands each shared contract, such as an API payload or an error code, to both sides before either builds on it. Every change, down to a one-line typo, is its own worktree and PR, and a PR whose human-readable part doesn't fit in about fifteen lines gets split.
Why it matters for code review
Two details are worth stealing. First, the merge gate runs on the shop's own boxes rather than rented CI, one gate per box at a time, because agents produce more PRs than hosted runners comfortably absorb, and merging is refused unless the latest commit is green. Second, the guardrails come from incidents: a PR that moved a layout provider passed its gate and looked right in screenshots, yet broke nine end-to-end specs, so any PR that relocates a layout, provider, or navigator now has to run the affected specs before it merges.
The division of labor is the plain version of the overnight-factory argument. People pick what gets built, make product calls, and sign off on anything that spends money or can't be undone. Everything else keeps moving through the night behind the gate and leaves a written trail, so the morning review is of finished, evidenced work rather than of work in progress.