Context as the bottleneck

Once agents make code cheap, the residue of negotiation becomes visible, and the real limit is shared context.

• Shared context is the commodity an organization runs on, accreted by osmosis, mostly never written down. Agents cannot do osmosis: whatever is not in the prompt, files, tools, or instructions, they do not reliably have.
• Without that context an agent produces a plausible answer to a slightly wrong version of the question.
• The roadmap becomes the limit: engineers stop waiting on each other and start waiting on well-formed specs. The bottleneck moves from writers to the people deciding what to build.
• The opportunity: agents are unusually good at reading exhaust (PRs, issues, commits, threads) and externalizing implicit knowledge, building a written substrate the org would never have produced alone.

This is the organizational counterpart to the per-session context management problem: one is about a single agent’s window, the other about the team’s shared picture.

Sources: 0009-bottleneck-never-code.md

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