LLMs are idiots and they will never get better because they have quadratic attention and a limited context window.

If the tokens that need to attend to each other are on opposite ends of the code base the only way to do that is by reading in the whole code base and hoping for the best.

If you're very lucky you can chunk the code base in such a way that the chunks pairwise fit in your context window and you can extract the relevant tokens hierarchically.

If you're not. Well get reading monkey.

Agents, md files, etc. are bandaids to hide this fact. They work great until they don't.