How I stopped babysitting Claude Code and Codex on hours long runs: planning, git checkpoints and a test gate outside the agent

I run Claude Code and Codex on long, multi-step tasks on an isolated machine and I kept hitting the same handful of issues: * The agent reports a task as done when the tests didn't actually pass and blames "prexisting bugs." * Context fills up and compaction makes the agent forget why it did something three steps back, which wastes tokens and creates downstream bugs. * One blocked task stalls the whole run. I just wanted to leave my agent running without giving up control. Here's what I did about each: * **Lying about tests:** the build and test commands run outside the worker, so it can't claim success and skip the gate. On failure it reverts to a git checkpoint and retries with the failure context. * **Compaction amnesia:** each task runs in a fresh worker, so nothing drags through a long compaction cycle. A worker can still inspect prior work when it needs to. * **Blocked tasks:** the plan is a DAG, so one block doesn't stop everything. It keeps working on tasks that aren't downstream and asks me a focused question in Telegram. * **Staying in control:** Claude Code drafts the plan, Codex reviews it, and I approve it before anything runs. There's a git checkpoint before each task, and the whole execution trail is on disk: plans, prompts, stdout/stderr, attempts, checkpoints, lessons. I packaged this into an open source tool, link in a comment if it's useful, but I'm mostly curious how others here handle the "agent is a bad witness of its own work" problem. Putting the test gate outside the worker is the only thing that reliably worked for me. What are you doing for that?