I've been experimenting with improving coding agent performance by improving written documentation. Anecdotally I've seen that, compared to the vibecoded mess I inherited, improving the docs let us use smaller models and get better quality work out of them.

Replacing our skill files with Markdown documentation also made a difference. My hunch is it's because skills tend to get mass dumped into the context window, whereas the agent harness can make more judicious decisions about how to include that information.

But I haven't seen much indication that any of this affects any model's tendency to make a mess of the code, regardless of its context window size. Or the documentation, for that matter. Maybe we can find a hack to get them to do that well, too. I certainly hope so, because I can't see how this context window size red queen's race is sustainable.