alt Hacker NewsWhy 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.
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Completely agree. Until recently I only let LLMs write my commit messages, but I've found that versioning the plan files is the better artifact, it preserves agentic decisions and my own reasoning without the noise.
My current workflow: write a detailed plan first, then run a standard implement -> review loop where the agent updates the plan as errors surface. The final plan doc becomes something genuinely useful for future iterations, not just a transcript of how we got there.
In my case I have set up the agent is the repo. The repo texts compose the agent’s memory. Changes to the repo require the agent to approve.
Repos also message each other and coordinate plans and changes with each other and make feature requests which the repo agent then manages.
So I keep the agents’ semantically compressed memories as part of the repo as well as the original transcripts because often they lose coherence and reviewing every user submitted prompt realigns the specs and stories and requirements.
post mortems / bug hunting -- pinpointing what part of the logic was to blame for a certain problem.
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.
It should be a distillation of the session and/or the prompts, at bare minimum. No, it should not include e.g. research-type questions, but it should include prompts that the user wrote after reading the answers to those research-type questions, and perhaps some distillation of the links / references surfaced during the research.
Prompts probably should be distilled / summarized, especially if they are research-based prompts, but code-gen prompts should probably be saved verbatim.
Reproducibility is a thing, and though perfect reproducibility isn't desirable, something needs to make up for the fact that vibe-coding is highly inscrutable and hard to review. Making the summary of the session too vague / distilled makes it hard to iterate and improve when / if some bad prompts / assumptions are not documented in any way.