Useful Things Agents Can Do That Are Not Writing Code A September 11, 2026 article details non-coding uses for AI coding agents, including fixing merge conflicts in pull requests, finding GitHub issues relevant to a branch, and diagnosing GitHub Actions failures. The author shares reusable `pi` prompts for each task, such as `/fix-pr-conflict #4222`, `/fd-issue`, and `/diagnose-action-failure`, and notes that 90% of the time a GitHub Actions workflow fails it is due to a forgotten formatter or static analysis run rather than a bug. The author frames the prompts as inspiration rather than a workflow to copy. The discourse is abuzz with the wonderful and horrendous things you can do when you allow an AI coding agent to write code. People who allow an agent née clanker to write all the code in an application are often called “vibe-coders”. This article is not about vibe coding. In fact, this article is about all the things you can do with an AI agent that are separate from writing code. With each of these, I’ll go through the use-case, then include the latest version of the pi prompt that I use. I do not believe you should use my prompts precisely. I am not suggesting that you copy my workflow. The beauty of many of these tools is that they are flexible and can be adapted to your style of work. I offer my prompts as inspiration. Maybe there are things you could be using an agent for that are not writing code. I often find myself needing to fix merge conflicts for my PRs because either myself or an open-source contributor has modified the code upstream. Almost always, these conflicts are formatting or boilerplate changes that do not need my full attention. In other words, it’s the perfect job for a clanker. Here is my prompt: --- description: Fix a merge conflict in a PR. argument-hint: "