Indeed, filling the adversitsed context more than 1/4 full is a bad idea in general. 50k tokens is a fair bit, but works out to between 1 and 10k lines of code.
Perfect for a demo or work on a single self contained file.
Disastrous for a large code base with logic scattered all throughout it.
Right. It’s not practical to apply AI tools as they are today to existing, complex code bases and get reliable results.
Greenfield is easy (but it always was). Working on well-organised modules that are self contained and cleanly designed is easy - but that always was, too.