Coding Agents for Software Engineers

Architecture, Context, and Efficient Usage 1️⃣ What Is a Coding Agent? A coding agent is not just an LLM. It is a system: IDE / CLI ↓ Agent Runtime ↓ Context Builder ↓ LLM Inference ↓ Tool Execution (fs, git, tests, shell) ↓ Loop The model is only the reasoning engine. The runtime handles orchestration. 2️⃣ General Architecture of a Coding Agent A production-grade coding agent includes: 1. Indexing Layer Repo scanning Symbol extraction Dependency graph Optional embeddings 2. Context Builder Select relevant files Inject instructions Add plan/scratchpad Add recent edits 3. LLM Inference Layer Tokenized prompt Context window constraints Streaming output 4. Tool Layer File read/write Test execution Git diff/patch Lint/build commands 5. Loop Controller Plan Execute Validate Iterate The model does not “see the repo.” The agent chooses wha