which coding agents actually understand context instead of just autocompleting

A developer's three-month experience with multiple coding agents revealed that while agents accelerate first-draft pull requests when given full design context, they often lose this context when switching tools. This necessitates re-explaining intent, making the developer an "integration layer" manually stitching context between disconnected sessions. The primary bottleneck isn't the agents' code quality but the lack of persistent context across different tools. The developer would use them again only if this context-sharing issue is resolved.

This developer's three-month, side-by-side comparison of coding agents highlights the bottleneck of context loss across tools, unlike typical reviews focusing on code quality.