Everyone I know who is using AI effectively has solved for the context window problem in their process. You use design, planning and task documents to bootstrap fresh contexts as the agents move through the task. Using these approaches you can have the agents address bigger and bigger problems. And you can get them to split the work into easily reviewable chunks, which is where the bottleneck is these days.
Plus the highest end models now don’t go so brain dead at compaction. I suspect that passing context well through compaction will be part of the next wave of model improvements.
My point wasn't that it's impossible, but that it creates a massive layer of overhead. Previously the project "state" lived in the developer's head; now for the agent to be effective, you have to constantly offload that state into design docs and task files. The job shifts from "writing code" to "managing external memory" for the agent. Those who have mastered this (like you) are indeed flying, but those trying to just chat with the code without this discipline are hitting a wall
Plus the highest end models now don’t go so brain dead at compaction. I suspect that passing context well through compaction will be part of the next wave of model improvements.