To be fair, I was mostly pointing out that you can get to the kernel of a useful agent very quickly and without much code, not making a claim that coding agents

To be fair, I was mostly pointing out that you can get to the kernel of a useful agent very quickly and without much code, not making a claim that coding agents would or should generally be tight. Competitive coding agents in particular are tricky, in part because the two mainstream agents (Codex and Claude) are big RL targets and you generally want to be in their slipstream --- or so I'm told. On the other hand: I have basically zero interest in writing a coding agent (there are so many effective ones already), but I write lots of little agents, for instance in my music player, and those are as code artifacts pretty trivial.