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bunderbunder • yesterday at 6:24 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

Gotcha. My apologies. It sounds like I misunderstood your original point and I've been talking past you this whole time.

I've been experimenting with improving coding agent performance by improving written documentation. Anecdotally I've seen that, compared to the vibecoded mess I inherited, improving the docs let us use smaller models and get better quality work out of them.

Replacing our skill files with Markdown documentation also made a difference. My hunch is it's because skills tend to get mass dumped into the context window, whereas the agent harness can make more judicious decisions about how to include that information.

But I haven't seen much indication that any of this affects any model's tendency to make a mess of the code, regardless of its context window size. Or the documentation, for that matter. Maybe we can find a hack to get them to do that well, too. I certainly hope so, because I can't see how this context window size red queen's race is sustainable.