I’ve been working with coding agents for quite a while now. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 15 years, and at first it was hard for me to accept that the rules of the game had changed forever. I’ve stopped thinking of coding agents as autocomplete. In many tasks, they can reason through codebases and produce solid implementations. But one thing still feels missing. I haven’t managed to feel that I’m working side by side with an engineer who knows the repository. Someone familiar with the project’s codebase, its strategies, its typical errors, the commands that should be run and the ones that shouldn’t. A veteran teammate, not a rookie who has to review the whole repo, starting from the README and the Makefile, before writing a single line of code. At first I thought it was all about refining prompts. Then I focused on operational memory, skills, MCPs, rules, global instructions, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and everything I kept reading over and over again in articles and posts.…