30 pointsby mandel_x3 hours ago20 comments
  • rfw300an hour ago
    Why should it be? The agent session is a messy intermediate output, not an artifact that should be part of the final product. If the "why" of a code change is important, have your agent write a commit message or a documentation file that is polished and intended for consumption.
    • lacunaryan hour ago
      but that takes more tokens and time. if you just save the raw log, you can always do that later if you want to consume it. plus, having the full log allows asking many different questions later.
    • aspenmartinan hour ago
      post mortems / bug hunting -- pinpointing what part of the logic was to blame for a certain problem.
    • AndrewKemendoan hour ago
      How’s it any different than a diff log?
      • xboxnolifesan hour ago
        Better question: how is it in any way similar?
        • AndrewKemendo8 minutes ago
          If you read the history of both and assuming that there’s good comments and documentation, it shows you the reasoning that went into the decision-making
  • abustamam19 minutes ago
    I don't think it should be. I think a distilled summary of what the agent did should be committed. This requires some dev discipline. But for example:

    Make a button that does X when clicked.

    Agent makes the button.

    I tell it to make the button red.

    Agent makes it red.

    I test it, it is missing an edge case. I tell it to fix it.

    It fixes it.

    I don't like where the button is. I tell it to put it in the sidebar.

    It does that.

    I can go on and on. But we don't need to know all those intermediaries. We just need to know Red button that does X by Y mechanism is in the sidebar. Tests that include edge cases here. All tests passing. 2026-03-01

    And that document is persisted.

    If later, the button gets deleted or moved again or something, we can instruct the agent to say why. Button deleted because not used and was noisy. 2026-03-02

    This can be made trivial via skills, but I find it a good way to understand a bit more deeply than commit messages would allow me to do.

    Of course, we can also just write (or instruct agents to write) better PRs but AFAICT there's no easy way to know that the button came about or was deleted by which PR unless you spelunk in git blame.

  • causalan hour ago
    If a car is used to get you somewhere, should you put the exhaust in bags to bring with you?
    • cyberax26 minutes ago
      We use flight data recorders on airplanes, though.
    • mannanj36 minutes ago
      Is session context car exhaust? Or is it the Event logs and code of the CPU/car's brains?
  • daemonkan hour ago
    I did this in the beginning and realized I never went back to it. I think we have to learn to embrace the chaos. We can try to place a couple of anchors in the search space by having Claude summarize the code base every once in a while, but I am not sure if even that is necessary. The code it writes is git versioned and is probably enough to go on.
  • daxfohl42 minutes ago
    I think so. If nothing else, when you deploy and see a bug, you can have a script that revives the LLMs of the last N commits and ask "would your change have caused this?" Probably wouldn't work or be any more efficient than a new debugging agent most of the time, but it might sometimes and you'd have a fix PR ready before you even answered the pager. And it's cheap, so why not.

    Maybe not a permanent part of the commit, but something stored on the side for a few weeks at a time. Or even permanently, it could be useful to go back and ask, "why did you do it that way?", and realize that the reason is no longer relevant and you can simplify the design without worrying you're breaking something.

  • burntoutgray2 hours ago
    YES! The session becomes the source code.

    Back in the dark ages, you'd "cc -s hello.c" to check the assembler source. With time we stopped doing that and hello.c became the originating artefact. On the same basis the session becomes the originating artefact.

    • lich_kingan hour ago
      I'm not sure this analogy holds, for two reasons. First, even in the best case, chain-of-thought transcripts don't reliably tell you what the agent is doing and why it's doing it. Second, if you're dealing with a malicious actor, the transcript may have no relation to the code they're submitting.

      The reason you don't have to look at assembly is that the .c file is essentially a 100% reliable and unambiguous spec of how the assembly will look like, and you will be generating the assembly from that .c file as a part of the build process anyway. I don't see how this works here. It adds a lengthy artifact without lessening the need for a code review. It may be useful for investigations in enterprise settings, but in the OSS ecosystem?...

      Also, people using AI coding tools to submit patches to open-source projects are weirdly hesitant to disclose that.

    • WD-42an hour ago
      This is only true if a llm session would produce a deterministic output which is not the case. This whole “LLMs are the new compiler” argument doesn’t hold water.
    • sumenoan hour ago
      cc was deterministic, you could be confident that the same code produced the same assembly each time you ran it

      That is very much not the case with LLMs

    • ehntoan hour ago
      LLMs are non-deterministic, you would end up with a different output even if you paste the same conversation in. Even if the model was identical at the time you tried to reproduce it. Which gets less likely as time passes.

      Also, why would you need to reproduce it? You have the code. Almost any modification to said code would benefit from a fresh context and refined prompt.

      An actual full context of a thinking agent is asinine, full of busy work, at best if you want to preserve the "reason" for the commits contents maybe you could summarise the context.

      Other than that I see no reason to store the whole context per commit.

  • natex84an hour ago
    If the model in use is managed by a 3rd party, can be updated at will, and also gives different output each time it is interacted with, what is the main benefit?

    If I chat with an agent and give an initial prompt, and it gets "aspect A" (some arbitrary aspect of the expected code) wrong, I'll iterate to get "aspect A" corrected. Other aspects of the output may have exactly matched my (potentially unstated) expectation.

    If I feed the initial prompt into the agent at some later date, should I expect exactly "aspect A" to be incorrect again? It seems more likely the result will be different, maybe with some other aspects being "unexpected". Maybe these new problems weren't even discussed in the initial archived chat log, since at that time they happened to be generated in a way in alignment with the original engineers expectation.

    • bear3r30 minutes ago
      reproducibility isn't really the goal imo. more like a decision audit trail -- same reason code comments have value even though you can't regenerate the code from them. six months later when you're debugging you want to know 'why did we choose this approach' not 'replay the exact conversation.'
    • fragmedean hour ago
      Because intent matters and 6 months or 3 years down the line and it's time to refactor, and the original human author is long gone, there's a difference if the prompt was "I need a login screen" vs "I need a login screen, it should support magic link login and nothing else".
      • superturkey65039 minutes ago
        Isn’t that point of design docs and not the commit log?
  • YoumuChanan hour ago
    Should my google search history be part of the commit? To that question my answer is no.
    • travisjungroth21 minutes ago
      I was looking for an analogy and this is a good one.

      The noise to signal ratio seems so bad. You’d have to sift through every little “thought”. If I could record my thought stream would I add it to the commit? Hell no.

      Now, a summary of the reasoning, assumptions made and what alternatives were considered? Sure, that makes for a great message.

  • ramozan hour ago
    We think so as well with emphasis on "why" for commits (i.e. intent provenance of all decisions).

    https://github.com/eqtylab/y just a prototype, built at codex hackathon

    The barrier for entry is just including the complete sessions. It gets a little nuanced because of the sheer size and workflows around squash merging and what not, and deciding where you actually want to store the sessions. For instance, get notes is intuitive; however, there are complexities around it. Less elegant approach is just to take all sessions in separate branches.

    Beyond this, you could have agents summarize an intuitive data structure as to why certain commits exist and how the code arrived there. I think this would be a general utility for human and AI code reviewers alike. That is what we built. Cost /utility need to make sense. Research needs to determine if this is all actually better than proper comments in code

  • an hour ago
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  • rcyan hour ago
    I haven't adopted this yet, but have a feeling that something like this is the right level of recording the llm contribution / session https://blog.bryanl.dev/posts/change-intent-records
    • 4b11b49 minutes ago
      I like it, but it seemed test could capture some of these "behaviors". But having it in a single document is helpful for context
  • travisgriggsan hour ago
    In our (small) team, we’ve taken to documenting/disclosing what part(s) of the process an LLM tool played in the proposed changes. We’ve all agreed that we like this better, both as submitters and reviewers. And though we’ve discussed why, none of us has coined exactly WHY we like this model better.
  • foamzou43 minutes ago
    No. Prompt-like document is enough. (e.g. skills, AGENTS.md)
  • mandel_x3 hours ago
    I’ve been thinking about a simple problem: We’re increasingly merging AI-assisted code into production, but we rarely preserve the thing that actually produced it — the session. Six months later, when debugging or reviewing history, the only artifact left is the diff. So I built git-memento. It attaches AI session transcripts to commits using Git notes.
    • denismian hour ago
      > the only artifact left is the diff

      You also have code comments, docs in the repo, the commit message, the description and comments on the PR, the description and comments on your Issue tracker.

      Providing context for a change is a solved problem, and there is relatively mature MCP for all common tooling.

    • latexr3 hours ago
      A better solution would be to read and understand the code before committing it.
      • mandel_x3 hours ago
        People won’t do that, unfortunately. We are a dying breed (I hate it). I went against my own instincts and vibe code this, works as a proof of concept.

        You can see the session (including my typos) and compare what was asked for and what you got.

    • midnitewarrioran hour ago
      I already invented this in my head, thanks for not making me code it.

      Excellent idea, I just wish GitHub would show notes. You also risk losing those notes if you rebase the commit they are attached to, so make sure you only attach the notes to a commit on main.

      • mandel_x33 minutes ago
        I added an action that will add a comment with the notes in GitHub so that you can see them directly.

        I did work around squash to collect all sessions and concatenate them as a single one

  • spionan hour ago
    A summary of the session should be part of the commit message.
  • lsc471936 minutes ago
    Proof sketch is not proof
  • danhergir3 hours ago
    One of the use cases i see for this tool is helping companies to understand the output coming from the llm blackbox and the process which the employee took to complete a certain task
    • tartoranan hour ago
      Why do that? Just let them deal with it.
  • jiveturkeyan hour ago
    • reg_dunlopan hour ago
      Thank you! Was looking for this company. Founder was high up at GitHub. Really an interesting proposition
  • hsuduebc2an hour ago
    I must say that would certainly show some funny converstaions in a log.
  • ares6233 hours ago
    Maybe Git isn't the right tool to track the sessions. Some kind of new Semi-Human Intelligence Tracking tool. It will need a clever and shorter name though.