A basic conversational coding agent that edits files and handles fairly sophisticated tasks can be implemented in no more than 200 lines of code, without features such as sub-agents or MCP.

“Um, and of course, there's like bells and whistles. There's no sub-agents. There's no MCP, none of that stuff. But if you wanna see something that you talk to and then it literally will edit your file, and you can do s- pretty sophisticated things with it, you c-- it doesn't require more than two hundred lines.”