Coding Agents Fail From Bad Context Management, Not Dumb Models
FounderWithCode · reddit · 2026-08-29
The author argues that what breaks coding agents is usually not intelligence but context management: they scan half the repo, forget the original task, re-read already-inspected files, change unrelated code, and burn tokens rediscovering their own work.
The proposal: treat context like a budget — keep a tiny task ledger, record which files were already inspected, load only relevant code, run the smallest test first, and explicitly mark decisions that shouldn't be revisited without new evidence. Less 'think harder', more 'stop forgetting'.
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