3 parts · June 26, 2026 — read in order, start to finish.
The two best coding agents disagree at the architecture level on how to find the right code. One builds a vector index of your repo; the other threw the index away and runs grep. The split is about freshness, not accuracy.
Everyone argues about which model to use. The under-discussed variable is how the agent writes its changes to disk — and that edit format is often the real bottleneck.
The bottleneck in a coding agent isn't the smart model deciding what to change. It's the dull mechanical work of writing that change to disk correctly — and that's a different model entirely.
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