7 memory slots vs 200K tokens: the hardware mismatch behind AI coding debt
esrtweet · x · 2026-11-11
A widely shared take: there's a fundamental hardware mismatch between human engineers and LLMs. Your working memory holds 7 items; your coding agent's context window holds 200,000+ tokens. By 5 PM your slots are fried reconstructing mental models of code you didn't write, while the agent keeps cranking out 500-line changesets — and AI coding errors compound geometrically, so one wrong abstraction at step 1 leaves 10 files on a broken foundation by step 5. The fix: shrink the loop — never let the agent generate more per step than you can verify in two minutes.
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