Eye on A.I. · Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Alexander Whedon of Subquadratic discusses the current limitations of AI coding agents, highlighting that a vast majority of their operational time is dedicated to reading and understanding code. This observation is a key insight driving Subquadratic's approach to developing more effective AI coding tools.
“And the reason that this is important is because if you know that most of the time is spent on reading and understanding, then you can optimize for that. We can build better models for reading and understanding code, and that will have a much bigger impact than optimizing for generation.”