Large context models don't do a great job of consistently attending to the entire context, so it might not work out as well in practice as continuing to improve

Large context models don't do a great job of consistently attending to the entire context, so it might not work out as well in practice as continuing to improve the context engineering parts of coding agents would. I'd bet that most the improvement in Copilot style tools over the past year is coming from rapid progress in context engineering techniques, and the contribution of LLMs is more modest. LLMs' native ability to independently "reason" about a large slushpile of tokens just hasn't improved enough over that same time period to account for how much better the LLM coding tools have become. It's hard to see or confirm that, though, because the only direct comparison you can make is changing your LLM selection in the current version of the tool. Plugging GPT5 into the original version of Copilot from 2021 isn't an experiment most of us are able to try.