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Context is the bottleneck for coding agents now

(runnercode.com)
196 points zmccormick7 | 4 comments | 26 Sep 25 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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aliljet ◴[26 Sep 25 15:27 UTC] No.45387614[source]▶
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.

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neutronicus ◴[26 Sep 25 15:32 UTC] No.45387672[source]▶
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.

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1. AlGoreRhythm ◴[26 Sep 25 16:28 UTC] No.45388311[source]▶
Out of curiosity, how would you rate an LLM’s ability to deal with pointers in C++ code?
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2. neutronicus ◴[26 Sep 25 17:36 UTC] No.45389012[source]▶
Greenfield project? Claude is fucking great at C++. Almost all aspects of it, really.

Well, not so much the project organization stuff - it wants to stuff everything into one header and has to be browbeaten into keeping implementations out of headers.

But language semantics? It's pretty great at those. And when it screws up it's also really good at interpreting compiler error messages.

3. jdrek1 ◴[26 Sep 25 18:16 UTC] No.45389408[source]▶
If you have lots of pointers, you're writing C, not C++.
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4. neutronicus ◴[26 Sep 25 18:35 UTC] No.45389622[source]▶
Eh, it's a big tent