The Bitter Lesson Applied: Why Coding Agents Need More Compute, Not More Cleverness

Rich Sutton's bitter lesson predicted that scaling compute beats hand-engineering. Seven years later, coding agents are proving him right. The fix isn't smarter models. It's specialized infrastructure.

Tejas Bhakta
Tejas Bhakta
March 16, 20267 min read
The Bitter Lesson Applied: Why Coding Agents Need More Compute, Not More Cleverness