They need a proper memory. Imagine you're a very smart, skilled programmer but your memory resets every hour. You could probably get something done by making extensive notes as you go along, but you'll still be smoked by someone who can actually remember what they were doing in the morning. That's the situation these coding agents are in. The fact that they do as well as they do is remarkable, considering.
This is precisely how I go about my usage pattern with Cursor that I already have, I structure my repo declaratively with a Clojure and Nix build pipeline so when my context maxes out for a chat session, the repo is self-evident self-documented enough that a new chat session automatically has a heightened context
