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 weirdness. Naming conventions nobody wrote down. Migration leftovers. Feature flags with political history. Tests that exist because of one brutal production incident. API boundaries that look accidental until you remove them and break billing. A hundred tiny facts that separate a useful change from a confident mess.
