The model isn't the problem. I went back through 20 of my agent's pull requests and the failures looked exactly like a junior's first month.

3 of them tried to rewrite things nobody asked them to rewrite. 5 skipped the test, or wrote a test that would have passed either way. 4 fixed the bug but broke something else in the process.

I used to assume model quality was the main driver. It isn't.

The agent doesn't ship a one-line fix. It opens a change touching twelve files, half of them unrelated to the bug. It writes the code and skips the test. Or it writes a test that proves nothing.

But notice that none of these are model problems. They're the same review failures a junior would ship. Just at higher volume and with more confidence.

The practical move: stop logging "the agent failed" and start logging why. Counting ch ...