I'm an avid user of coding agents, but there's something I've been struggling to put into words which I think is encapsulated well by these screenshots. these are two PRs to fix the same bug: the first is a +627 / -291 line change, from Claude, the second is a +3 / -2 line change, from Matt, a human (we closed the former and merged the latter). there's a certain coherence in a human's mental model of the codebase which makes some bugs trivial for humans and still really difficult (or token-expensive) for agents. this goes beyond just better memory of the codebase. humans will build a mental map and a probability matrix for which parts of the codebase are most likely to surface a particular bug, given the codebase's coherence, and start by tackling those before going another layer deeper. without matt's contribution we might well have merged the +627 / -291 PR, in turn losing coherence, and becoming more token-dependent as a result. after you lose coherence it's game over. i've found myself pair programming with agents on tiny PRs after a huge amount of independent research / agent swarms to tackle a given problem, and I think this is pretty effective; you can combine the things that agents are naturally good at (parallelization, verifiable problems) with your human coherence. often this results in 15-20 PRs, not all of which get merged.