How Long Can a Coding Agent Work on Its Own?

Jonathan Siddharth says a coding agent today can reliably work for two days at a stretch, and is still far from working on its own for weeks, months, or years.

The way forward is a set of reinforcement-learning environments that mimic how professionals actually work. He pictures a five-dimensional matrix of every workflow, every role, every function, every company type, and every sector. Experts still supply the prompts, the verifiers, and realistic seed data so an agent can learn long-horizon work that is worth paying for.

The picture he offers for the next few years is not a hire that already happened. A new person at Sourcery is given a task, comes back for a one-on-one, applies the feedback, and may spin up a swarm of agents to interview other AIs or people and bring the research back. That picture is about AI speeding up real economic progress.