AI Coding Tools and the Runtime Context Gap

Current AI coding tools operate on source files. They read your code, predict what the application does, and generate edits. This works well for pure logic — functions with clear inputs and outputs, refactoring, type-level changes. It falls apart when the source code isn't the whole story. And for any application with a runtime - a web app running in a browser, a server handling requests, a framework with middleware and compiled output — the source code is never the whole story. This isn't just a frontend problem. Yes, the browser has computed styles and a rendered DOM that don't exist in your source files. But the server side has its own runtime context that source code alone can't capture: which routes are registered, what the compiled module graph looks like, what's in the server logs, what middleware is active and in what order. An AI editing your Next.js API route doesn't know what the dev server's module resolution actually produced. An AI editing your Astro page doesn't know whi