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> There is a part of me that wonders if it's partly just how much they can hold in their head right now, though. Even with the greatest articulation and high density of feeding them, the current setups don't allow them to hold a high-quality, sparse, 'zoomable' model of the world in their head that well yet, which we can do pretty well. My personal experiments show that giving them tools to access to all past sessions over a codebase helps a lot. When I coded "feature X" 2 months ago i likely specifically mentioned some constraints expressed as abstractions and, if the coding agent checks not only the code/feature it needs to implement/change but also the past sessions over that, it picks them up, and ships code that better fits the overall project. At least, more than "architectural/design guidelines", since they are more "concrete", to the point for the task at hand. Sessions self-preserve them for following sessions, which helps, but might also carry over stale things, so some "pruning" helps, and can be automated. Overall, as long as corrections were also made via agents and hence in sessions, they are picked up automatically. It's not the "human zoom" you refer to, which as humans we can drive/control, but the effect seems to be similar: I read autonomous sessions where it picked up from the past the very design/architecture/abstraction points i would have driven, had I been in the loop. In team contexts it should not be impossible to share sessions, but I not working in teams right now :D
So maybe it's also a "single dev quirk". Another point is that in a sense, learning to code goes from being told "you are using the_wrong_abstraction/this_abstraction_the_wrong_way/no_abstraction_where_you_should_have", to telling it to others/ourselves. Since the number of knowable abstractions seems to be "at least one more than I already know", agents can actually be helpful in learning. After a certain threshold, it basically zeros in a specific domain, but on novel domains agents taught me abstractions, when nudged towards doing that. |