Computers are fast. If a physic engine can compute a game world in 1/60 of a second. The majority of the tasks should be done in less than 7 minutes.

Whenever I see transcript of a long running task, I see a lot of drifting of the agent due to not having any context (or the codebase is not organized) and it trying various way to gather information. Then it settle on the wrong info and produce bad results.

Greppability of the codebase helps. So do following patterns and good naming. A quick overview of the codebase and convention description also shortens the reflection steps. Adding helper tools (scripts) help too.