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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. whstl ◴[26 Sep 25 17:13 UTC] No.45388791[source]▶
I "vibe coded" a Gateway/Proxy server that did a lot of request enrichment and proprietary authz stuff that was previously in AWS services. The goal was to save money by having a couple high-performance servers instead of relying on cloud-native stuff.

I put "vibe coded" is in quotes because the code was heavily reviewed after the process, I helped when the agent got stuck (I know pedants will complain but ), and this was definitely not my first rodeo in this domain and I just wanted to see how far an agent could go.

In the end it had a few modifications and went into prod, but to be really fair it was actually fine!

One thing I vibe coded 100% and barely looked at the code until the end was a MacOS menubar app that shows some company stats. I wanted it in Swift but WITHOUT Xcode. It was super helpful in that regard.