Comment by deepsk

As I said there, it's inherently something the LLM can't do, at least not without lots of engineering. So I'm assuming you're talking about "as a human" here.

Some of it is just trial and error. You notice it makes an incorrect assumption, it takes longer to find something than it should, and so on. Some of that can be predicted, simply by you knowing the codebase. If you sat down with a new hire to walk them through it and get them up to speed, what would you tell them? It'd be a waste of time to tell them about things they can easily figure out on their own within a minute by looking at filenames and so on. It's the low effort thing to do, but it also achieves nothing.

For example, "A's B component has a default C which should be overridden unless desired". If A is an internal library then you could just fix that if it goes against the LLM's common assumptions, but maybe it's an external dependency and it's not worth it.

Or maybe you're building a game, and there are a few core mechanics that are relevant to much of the logic. Then you can likely explain in a few sentences what would otherwise need hundreds of lines of code read across multiple files. So you put that in an AGENTS.MD file in a relevant folder so it gets autoloaded when touching any of that code.