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Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

runnercode.com

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Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#21

Post by nsedlet »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #6

Context is a bottleneck for humans as well. We don’t have full context when going through the code because we can’t hold full context. We summarize context and remember summarizations of it. Maybe we need to do this with the LLM. Chain of thought sort of does this but it’s not deliberate. The system prompt needs to mark this as a deliberate task of building summaries and notes notes of the entire code base and this s…

Agreed. As engineers we build context every time we interact with the codebase. LLMs don't do that.

A good senior engineer has a ton in their head after 6+ months in a codebase. You can spend a lot of time trying to equip Claude Code with the equivalent in the form of CLAUDE.MD, references to docs, etc., but it's a lot of work, and it's not clear that the agents even use it well (yet).

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#22

Post by [deleted] »

marstall wrote: post #9

> Level 2 - One commit - Cursor and Claude Code work well for tasks in this size range. I'll stop ya right there. Spending the past few weeks fixing bugs in a big multi-tier app (which is what any production software is this days). My output per bug is always one commit, often one line. Claude is an occasional help, nothing more. Certainly not generating the commit for me!

[deleted]

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#23

Post by hirako2000 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #6

Context is a bottleneck for humans as well. We don’t have full context when going through the code because we can’t hold full context. We summarize context and remember summarizations of it. Maybe we need to do this with the LLM. Chain of thought sort of does this but it’s not deliberate. The system prompt needs to mark this as a deliberate task of building summaries and notes notes of the entire code base and this s…

That is not how the brain does it.

We do take notes, we summarize our writings, that's a process. But the brain does not follow that primitive process to "scale".

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#24

Post by neutronicus »

aliljet wrote: post #14

There's a misunderstanding here broadly. Context could be infinite, but the real bottleneck is understanding intent late in a multi-step operation. A human can effectively discard or disregard prior information as the narrow window of focus moves to a new task, LLMs seem incredibly bad at this. Having more context, but leaving open an inability to effectively focus on the latest task is the real problem.

No, I think context itself is still an issue.

Coding agents choke on our big C++ code-base pretty spectacularly if asked to reference large files.

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#25

Post by lomase »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #17
maerF0x0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember summarizations yes, and if you're an engineering manager you retain _out of date_ summarizations, often materially out of date.

I addressed this. The AI needs to examine every code change going in whether that code change comes from AI or not and edit the summaries accordingly. This is something humans dont actually do. We aren’t aware of every change and we don’t have updated documentation of every change so the LLM will be doing better in this regard.

I mean... have you ever heard of this small tool called GIT that people use to track code changes?

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#26

Post by skaosobab »

bhu8 wrote: post #3

IMHO, jumping from Level 2 to Level 5 is a matter of: - Better structured codebases - we need hierarchical codebases with minimal depth, maximal orthogonality and reasonable width. Think microservices. - Better documentation - most code documentations are not built to handle updates. We need a proper graph structure with few sources of truth that get propagated downstream. Again, some optimal sort of hierarchy is cru…

> Think microservices.

Microservices should already be a last resort when you’ve either: a) hit technical scale that necessitates it b) hit organizational complexity that necessitates it

Opting to introduce them sooner will almost certainly increase the complexity of your codebase prematurely (already a hallmark of LLM development).

> Better documentation

If this means reasoning as to why decisions are made then yes. If this means explaining the code then no - code is the best documentation. English is nowhere near as good at describing how to interface with computers.

Given how long gpt codex 5 has been out, there’s no way you’ve followed these practices for a reasonable enough time to consider them definitive (2 years at the least, likely much longer).

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#27

Post by HankStallone »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #7

I've noticed that chatgpt doesnt seem to be very good at understanding elapsed time. I have some long running threads and unless i prompt it with elapsed time ("it's now 7 days later") the responses act like it was 1 second after the last message. I think this might be a good leap for agents, the ability to not just review a doc in it's current state, but to keep in context/understanding the full evolution of a docum…

I've noticed the same thing with Grok. One time it predicted a X% chance that something would happen by July 31. On August 1, it was still predicting the thing would happen by July 31, just with lower (but non-zero) odds. Their grasp on time is tenuous at best.

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#28

Post by bhu8 »

lomase wrote: post #5
bhu8 wrote: post #3

IMHO, jumping from Level 2 to Level 5 is a matter of: - Better structured codebases - we need hierarchical codebases with minimal depth, maximal orthogonality and reasonable width. Think microservices. - Better documentation - most code documentations are not built to handle updates. We need a proper graph structure with few sources of truth that get propagated downstream. Again, some optimal sort of hierarchy is cru…

Can you show something you have built with that workflow?

Not yet unfortunately, but I'm in the process of building one.

This was my journey: I vibe-coded an Electron app and ended up with a terrible monolithic architecture, and mostly badly written code. Then, I took the app's architecture docs and spent a lot of my time shouting "MAKE THIS ARCHITECTURE MORE ORTHOGONAL, SOLID, KISS, DRY" to gpt-5-pro, and ended up with a 1500+ liner monster doc.

I'm now turning this into a Tauri app and following the new architecture to a T. I would say that it is has a pretty clean structure with multiple microservices.

Now, new features are gated based on the architecture doc, so I'm always maintaining a single source of truth that serves as the main context for any new discussions/features. Also, each microservice has its own README file(s) which are updated with each code change.

Re: Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

#29

Post by delusional »

These are such silly arguments. I sounds like people looking at a graph of a linear function crossing and exponential one at x=2, y=2 and wonder why the curves don't fit at x=3 y=40.

"Its not the x value that's the problem, its the y value".

You're right, it's not "raw intelligence" that's the bottleneck, because there's none of that in there. The truth is no tweak to any parameter is ever going to make the LLM capable of programming. Just like an exponential curve is always going to outgrow a linear one. You can't tweak the parameters out of that fundamental truth.

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