make

You cannot speed up an agent loop you are guessing about. A three-command shell helper - init, mark <phase>, report - stamps timestamps into a log and renders a markdown table at the end of every run. Call mark the moment a phase finishes, not when the next one starts, and let repeated labels sum. Phases worth separating: task setup, implement, check-suite runs, acceptance review, test refresh, commit. Committing the report next to the task turns wall-clock into a tracked artifact instead of a feeling. What it showed me: the coding is rarely the expensive part. It is the check-fix-recheck cycles and regenerating test scripts.

Building on plain markdown task files in backlog/in_progress/done, the actual technique is splitting the agent loop into three slash commands that each do exactly one thing. /roll researches the codebase and writes a task file - it implements nothing, which is what keeps planning honest and reviewable. /rock picks up one task and takes it end to end: implement, run the check suite, review the result against the task's own acceptance criteria, refresh the e2e scenarios, commit. /work is a thin loop over a list of task IDs that hands each one to a fresh subagent, so the main context never carries state from the previous task, and parks anything needing a human decision instead of stopping the whole batch. The split matters more than the commands. A single do-everything command quietly merges planning into implementation and you lose the reviewable step in the middle.