Okay so now I think you're describing the behaviour I take for granted with the harness i.e. Claude Code.

Having good repo readiness through a good agents/claude.md file + tests + docs means the LLM is able to read more files into its context.

It never occurred to me that anyone would prompt in isolation of their repos but I guess thats exactly what it was like for me last year when I was just feeding ChatGPT prompts away from the repo.