How to Give AI Coding Agents Better Codebase Context

TL;DR AI coding agents fail on large codebases because they lack structured context about how the system actually works. The industry has converged on three tiers of solutions: static context files (AGENTS.md, .cursorrules), retrieval-augmented generation (Sourcegraph Cody, Continue.dev), and persistent code intelligence platforms (CoreStory). Each tier solves a different scale of the problem. This article explains what each approach does, where it breaks down, and how to evaluate which tier you