PLACEHOLDER
Want to add a placeholder to this comment I started drafting on this video1 suggesting that the inability to hold the full context of a code base is the core limitation to agentic software engineering. I don’t think people have that either but we do just fine. I scrolled through the ffirst half of the comments and I couldn’t find the challenge that is on my mind here. But there was at least one commenter who pointed out, paraphrasing, that only leads on a team really have the context and most people are going to be just like LLMs, working with limited information.
Well my thought here is I agree with commenter John that few people have the full context. But I would say the number is really 0 though 馃槅. No one has the full literal context, using terminology from this video, but like Barbara Oakley in Learning How to Learn points out, chunked context is better.
So leads ought to have full chunked context. Well, unless Rain Man is on your team, 馃檪, because he had photographic memory. But as with Zoran’s premise, LLMs like Rain Man dont do well with higher order tasks. Real life Rain Man was able to remember tens of thousands of books but he was not putting that information to practical use.
When most people try to put too much context into their minds, they actually burn out locally–well I am projecting from personal experience haha but I think I can extrapolate here. But focusing on one specific task at a time, people can do great things. And it takes executive function to find the thing to do and then do it and then zoom back out and find the next thing.
Executive function is like the human equivalent of the coding agent harness. And maintaining the bare minimum context necessary is the key to not burning out as a person, when executing. And setting up that bare minimum context is also essential to getting the most out of an agentic interaction. The goldilocks zone for a good outcome.
So yea, no one really has the full literal picture. Funny enough, birds have the birds eye view, yet systems engineering does not appear to be part of their daily activities. Well, actually maybe you might say as nest builders, they do need a partial systems approach. But anyway, humans have a different perspective. You can have a zoomed out birds eye view but not by putting everything into your mental context but by compartmentalyzing concepts. Good Abstractions . Good modular .
And most enterprise code is such poor quality because it is not modular .