The next AI coding bottleneck is repo understanding (opens in new tab)

The least interesting thing an AI coding agent can do now is generate code. That sounds harsher than I mean it. Generation still matters. Better models still matter. Faster edits still matter. But if you have used these tools on a real codebase, not a demo repo with three files and no history, you already know where the pain moved. The bottleneck is not "can the model write a React component?" The bottleneck is "does the agent understand why this repo is weird?" Real repos are full of weirdne...