I'm not sure what do you mean by "whole file format", but if it refers to the write_file tool that overwrites the whole file, there is also the replace tool which is apparently inspired by a blog post [1] by Anthropic. It seems that Claude Code also supports the roughly identical tool (inferred from error messages), so editing tools can't be the reason why Claude Code is good.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/swe-bench-sonnet

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faangguyindia 4 days ago | parent [-]

Many agents can send diffs. Whole file reading and writing burns tokens and pollutes context.

	▲	lifthrasiir 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The replace tool is a form of diff (although it's rudimentary), and the read_file tool can be called with line ranges. I do wish robust patching but it is not the "whole" file reading/writing. Maybe you wanted to say about subagent file handling? I can agree then. (Also I think Gemini is significantly better when it comes to the context rot, in my experience 100K--300K tokens were required for symptoms to appear. So burning tokens is less problematic with Gemini.)