Building Agents Is Trivial Now, Context Is the Next Frontier — Jeff Ng, Unblocked
A coding agent with repository access still recommended a known outage trigger. Background agents need reconciled decisions and incident context, not just more raw MCP results.
An agent investigating QA latency of **3–4 seconds** versus an expected **hundreds of milliseconds** recommended re-enabling async dispatch. It missed a later Slack discussion and Linear postmortem showing that setting had caused an outage.
For unattended coding agents, retrieve decisions, incidents, tickets, conversations, and code together. Reconcile conflicts, rank relevance, enforce permissions, and provide a synthesized task view rather than making each agent resolve raw MCP output.
An agent investigating QA latency of **3–4 seconds** versus an expected **hundreds of milliseconds** recommended re-enabling async dispatch. It missed a later Slack discussion and Linear postmortem showing that setting had caused an outage. For unattended coding agents, retrieve decisions, incidents, tickets, conversations, and code together. Reconcile conflicts, rank relevance, enforce permissions, and provide a synthesized task view rather than making each agent resolve raw MCP output. The example demonstrates one corrected recommendation, not a measured reliability gain. Building and maintaining an organization-wide context model also introduces access-control, freshness, and conflict-resolution work.
This broadens coding-agent retrieval from repository evidence to organizational decision history: technically plausible advice can be wrong when later incidents, tickets, or conversations reverse the relevant context. It therefore raises synthesis, conflict reconciliation, freshness, and permissions to first-class context-layer responsibilities, though the single corrected case does not quantify reliability gains.