The Knowledge Chipper: An Agentic Coding Story

In my day to day development work, I find that my agents have to build up an incredible amount of knowledge about the problem I set them on. They scan files. They search API docs. They do a lot of work to get their context sufficiently full to be able to squirt out the relatively tiny number of final tokens that go into an actual code change. This is analogous to the way a developer reads a lot of code, builds a very detailed mental model of what the system is doing, and then edits just the files they need to. And (nearly) all that knowledge goes… away.