Coding agents do fine in a fresh repo and make a mess of a ten year old one. Everyone in this pack hit that wall on real code and came back with a different reason for it. The context window fills up with junk. Nobody is tending the design between reruns. The engineers who would catch the mistakes are the ones quietly refusing to use the thing. The order matters. Horthy and Pocock diagnose the problem from two directions, Zhang and Murag supply the mechanism both of them reach for, Liguori and Blum are about what happens when a whole team does this at once, and Pant is for the code you cannot afford to be wrong.
Why first: it names the mechanism everything else in this pack works around. Horthy's claim is that the context window is the only thing deciding the agent's next move, that quality drops once it is about 40 percent full, and that research, plan and implement exists to keep it under that line. Read this and the other five talks stop sounding like unrelated advice.
Why second: Horthy explains why the agent goes wrong, Pocock explains why the codebase does. He ran the workflow Horthy warns about, regenerating from a spec without reading the output, and watched the system get worse on every pass. His fix is old ideas, shared design language and small verified steps, applied to an agent.
Why here: the first two talks both end at the same place, write the house rules in a file the agent loads when it needs them. Zhang and Murag built that mechanism. A skill is a folder the agent only reads the name of until the moment it is relevant, which is Horthy's context problem solved at the level of the tool rather than the workflow.
Why here: the first talk about a team rather than an engineer. Amazon gave 50 ordinary teams the same tool. Half got under a 3x speedup and half got a median of 4.5x, and the difference was not the tool, it was whether the team changed how it worked. Liguori's five habits are the team-scale version of what Horthy and Pocock do alone.
Why here: Liguori says the teams that changed pulled ahead. Blum is the one who had to make them change. His finding at Figma is uncomfortable and rings true: the strongest engineers adopt last, because they hold the undocumented knowledge and see every failure first. His answer is to fund verification before persuasion.
Why last: every talk before this one ends at "a human has to check it", and every one of them admits humans cannot read pull requests as fast as agents write them. Pant's answer is to stop reading the code and check a proof instead. It only applies to the small part of a system where correctness is worth that much work, which is exactly why it belongs at the end rather than the start.