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Vipsy | 4 months ago

Coding agents tend to assume that the development environment is static and predictable, but real codebases are full of subtle, moving parts - tooling versions, custom scripts, CI quirks, and non-standard file layouts.

Many agents break down not because the code is too complex, but because invisible, “boring” infrastructure details trip them up. Human developers subconsciously navigate these pitfalls using tribal memory and accumulated hacks, but agents bluff through them until confronted by an edge case. This is why even trivial tasks intermittently fail with automation agents. you’re fighting not logic errors, but mismatches with the real lived context. Upgrading this context-awareness would be a genuine step change.

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pimeys|4 months ago

Yep. One of the things I've found agents always having a lot of trouble with is anything related to OpenTelemetry. There's a thing you call that uses some global somewhere, there's a docker container or two and there's the timing issues. It takes multiple tries to get anything right. Of course this is hard for a human too if you haven't used otel before...