Comment by TheMuenster
6 hours ago
Totally agree - the fundamental concept here of automatically improving context control when writing code is absolutely something that will be baked into agents in 6 months. The reason it hasn't yet is mainly because the improvements it makes seem to be very marginal.
You can contrast this to something like reasoning, which offered very large, very clear improvements in fundamental performance, and as a result was tackled very aggressively by all the labs. Or (like you mentioned) todo lists, which gave relatively small gains but were implemented relatively quickly. Automatic context control is just going to take more time to get it right, and the gains will be quite small.
Workflow matters too, how you organize your docs, work tasks, reviews. If you do it all by hand you spend a lot of time manually enforcing a process that can be automated.
I think task files with checkable gates are a very interesting animal - they carry intent, plan, work and reviews, at the end of work can become docs. Can be executed, but also passed as value, and reflect on themselves - so they sport homoiconicity and reflexion.