Why AI Coding Agents Waste Half Their Context Window

I've been running AI coding agents on a large codebase for months and noticed something that bugged me. Every time I gave an agent a task like "add a new API endpoint," it would spend 15-20 tool calls just figuring out where things are: grepping for routes, reading middleware files, checking types, reading files. By the time it actually started writing code, it had already burned through a huge chunk of its context window. I found out how much context position really matters.