Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at

Coding and...?

Copy and pasting.

Oh, sorry. You already said that. :D

Editing tools are easy to add it’s just you have to pick what things to give them because too many and they struggle as it uses up a lot of context. Still, as costs come down multiple steps to look for tools becomes cheaper too.

I’d like to see what happens with better refactoring tools, I’d make a bunch more mistakes copying and retyping or using awk. If they want to rename something they should be able to use the same tooling the rest of us get.

Asking questions is a good point but that’s both a bit of promoting and I think the move to having more parallel work makes it less relevant. One of the reasons clarifying things more upfront is useful is we take a lot of time and cost a lot of money to build things so the economics favours getting it right first time. As the time comes down and the cost drops to near zero, the balance changes.

There are also other approaches to clarify more what you want and how to do it first, breaking that down into tasks, then letting it run with those (spec kit). This is an interesting area.

4/5 times when Claude is looking for a file, it starts by running bash(dir c:\test /b)

First it gets an error because bash doesn’t understand \

Then it gets an error because /b doesn’t work

And as LLMs don’t learn from their mistakes, it always spends at least half a dozen tries (e.g. bash(cmd.exe /c dir c:\test /b )) before it figures out how to list files

If it was an actual coworker, we’d send it off to HR