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Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

(runnercode.com)
196 points zmccormick7 | 1 comments | 26 Sep 25 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bhu8 ◴[26 Sep 25 15:16 UTC] No.45387487[source]▶
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 crucial here.

At this point, I really don't think that we necessarily need better agents.

Setup your codebase optimally, spin up 5-10 instances of gpt-5-codex-high for each issue/feature/refactor (pick the best according to some criteria) and your life will go smoothly

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lomase ◴[26 Sep 25 15:18 UTC] No.45387502[source]▶
Can you show something you have built with that workflow?
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1. bhu8 ◴[26 Sep 25 15:32 UTC] No.45387678[source]▶
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.