alt Hacker NewsAgents don't really know the whole codebase when they're writing the code, their context is way too tiny for that; and trying to grow context numbers doesn't really work well (most of it gets ignored). So they're always working piece-meal and these failures are entirely expected unless the codebase is rigorously built for modularity and the agent is told to work "in the small" and keep to the existing constraints.
> Agents don't really know the whole codebase when they're writing the code
Neither do people, yet people manage to write software that they can evolve over a long time, and agents have yet to do that. I think it's because people can move back and forth between levels of abstraction, and they know when it's best to do it, but agents seem to have a really hard time doing that.
On the other hand, agents are very good at debugging complex bugs that span many parts of the codebase, and they manage to do that even with their context limitations. So I don't think it's about context. They're just not smart enough to write stable code yet.