Scaffolding, Not Code: Where AI Agents Actually Struggle

AI coding agents have proven highly capable at code generation, but practitioners are discovering that real-world failures stem not from code quality but from invisible scaffolding—configurations, environment-specific decisions, and institutional knowledge scattered across documentation and team memory. This insight reshapes the agentic development roadmap: the next frontier isn't smarter code generators, but tools that capture and externalize the hidden structural decisions that make production systems actually work.