Comment by dfajgljsldkjag
11 hours ago
Agents can complete an impressive amount of tasks with just this, but they quickly hit a bottleneck in loading context. A major reason for the success of agentic coding tools such as Claude and Cursor is how they push context of the problem and codebase into the agent proactively, rather than have the agent waste time and tokens figuring out how to list the directory etc.
Cursor does RAG based on the active state of the editor (focused window, cursor location, recently touched files, etc). This works really well for copilot style small modifications, but it's unhelpful for larger changes, and can actually cause some context rot.
Claude only loads specific files (e.g. CLAUDE.md) and any files those reference with @syntax on load. Everything else is discovered using grep/find mostly.
It's a tree design, once data is pulled it can remove the context of the code it wrote to pull some fancy data. Better yet the more advanced ones can re-add something old to the context to and drop it back out again if it needs to.