You've probably noticed something when using AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. The model doesn't just answer - it works. It reads a file, writes some code to search through it, reads another file, runs a check, and slowly pieces together an answer. It feels almost like watching someone think out loud. That intuition is important. Because a paper out of MIT CSAIL late last year - quietly titled Recursive Language Models - essentially formalizes exactly that

Every AI coding tool faces the same fundamental problem: your codebase is too large to fit in a context window, but the model needs to understand it to help you. How a tool solves that problem shapes everything about what it can and can't do. GitHub Copilot and Claude Code solve it in opposite ways - and the gap between them isn't a matter of polish or features. It's a genuine architectural disagreement. How Copilot Works: Index First, Retrieve Later If your repository is hos