{"id":625,"date":"2026-01-22T05:15:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T05:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/01\/22\/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents-ars-technica\/"},"modified":"2026-01-22T05:15:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T05:15:25","slug":"10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents-ars-technica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/01\/22\/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents-ars-technica\/","title":{"rendered":"10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents &#8211; Ars Technica"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>with LLMs, context is everything, and in language, context changes meaning. Take the word \u201cbank\u201d and add the words \u201criver\u201d or \u201ccentral\u201d in front of it, and see how the meaning changes. In a way, words act as addresses that unlock the semantic relationships encoded in a neural network. So if you put \u201ccheckerboard\u201d and \u201cgame\u201d in the context, the model\u2019s self-attention process links up a massive web of semantic associations about how checkers games should work, and that semantic baggage throws things off.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of tricks can help AI coders navigate around these limitations. First, avoid contaminating the context with irrelevant information. Second, when the agent gets stuck, try this prompt: \u201cWhat information do you need that would let you implement this perfectly right now? What tools are available to you that you could use to discover that information systematically without guessing?\u201d This forces the agent to identify (semantically link up) its own knowledge gaps, spelled out in the context window and subject to future action, instead of flailing around blindly.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2026\/01\/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents\/\">arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2026\/01\/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>with LLMs, context is everything, and in language, context changes meaning. Take the word \u201cbank\u201d and add the words \u201criver\u201d or \u201ccentral\u201d in front of it, and see how the meaning changes. In a way, words act as addresses that unlock the semantic relationships encoded in a neural network. So if you put \u201ccheckerboard\u201d and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,28,60,24,31,7,33],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ai","tag-categories","tag-coding","tag-computing","tag-concepts","tag-consciousness","tag-creativity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}