How coding agents read your code (and how to write for them) | Modem Blog
Modem's codebase is roughly 99.9% written by AI agents. Here's what that taught us about how agents actually navigate a repo, and the three levers you control: the names you choose, the types you define, and where you put your explanations.
Part 1 of Writing Code for Agents: how agents navigate your repo by string search, and how to write code they can actually find, parse, and trust. When we founded Modem in early 2025, we believed that AI coding was real, that it would rapidly accelerate software development, and that legacy product processes would become the new bottleneck for execution. To commit to that future, we built Modem with AI codegen tools from day one - back when Sonnet 3.7 was the leading coding model. A year later, Modem is a real product with paying customers: 360,000 lines of TypeScript application code and…
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