Context is comforting. A large context window gives managers, developers, and product demos the same pleasant illusion: if the model can see enough of the repository, it should stop missing important files. Put the whole codebase into the window. Add retrieval if necessary. Let the agent read, reason, edit, and move on. ...
Broken environments are where coding agents stop looking magical. A model can write a neat Python function, patch a repository, and explain the bug with courtroom confidence. Then it enters a terminal, meets a missing shared library, a corrupted dependency, a bad environment variable, or a filesystem permission issue, and suddenly the “autonomous engineer” starts behaving like an intern trapped inside conda. Not a bad intern, perhaps. Just one who keeps running the same command and hoping Linux will become more emotionally cooperative. ...