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I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations a

I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory. I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.

nullpoint420 5mo ago
I built this at my work and it didn’t turn out too well. It’s a distributed agentic system on Temporal where all inputs are signals to the workflow. And then each agent has its own GNOME desktop either in a K8S pod or KubeVirt VM. The biggest problem was context and ownership. The more we kept steering the model the worse it got until eventually it couldn’t complete its task. And on the ownership side, no one clearly owned the outcomes so it was just there… generating slop.
mupuff1234 5mo ago
What will chat history give you that the output of that chat won't?
- sheept 5mo ago
  Context? Without it, it would be like starting a new session for each follow-up prompt
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- simonw 5mo ago
  The same kind of value as a good commit history over just the finished code.
  - mupuff1234 5mo ago
    But you still have the commit/pr history. Not sure what adding the ramblings with an LLM will add.
- qazxcvbnmlp 5mo ago
  Was a specific piece of functionality intentional or an unintended byproduct of a previous change? Did someone else remove something but forget to take this out, or is it important? Etc
simonw 5mo ago
Yeah, I see the chat transcript as an important part of the work, and worth recording. I've taken to linking to mine in commit messages, e.g. this one: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/e781e4eef6efb28b5a2b8b00d49ac8dfaef3100b https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/e781e4eef... (My favourite feature of the new Codex desktop app is that it has a comprehensive "Copy as Markdown" feature, which I can then paste into a Gist.)
sciyoshi 5mo ago
This is essentially what Shopify did with River (https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river), and we built out something similar at our company. I'm sure the labs are working on this sort of thing - Managed Agents are probably the closest?

nullpoint420 5mo ago

I built this at my work and it didn’t turn out too well. It’s a distributed agentic system on Temporal where all inputs are signals to the workflow. And then each agent has its own GNOME desktop either in a K8S pod or KubeVirt VM. The biggest problem was context and ownership. The more we kept steering the model the worse it got until eventually it couldn’t complete its task. And on the ownership side, no one clearly owned the outcomes so it was just there… generating slop.

mupuff1234 5mo ago

What will chat history give you that the output of that chat won't?

sheept 5mo ago
Context? Without it, it would be like starting a new session for each follow-up prompt
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
simonw 5mo ago
The same kind of value as a good commit history over just the finished code.
- mupuff1234 5mo ago
  But you still have the commit/pr history. Not sure what adding the ramblings with an LLM will add.
qazxcvbnmlp 5mo ago
Was a specific piece of functionality intentional or an unintended byproduct of a previous change? Did someone else remove something but forget to take this out, or is it important? Etc

simonw 5mo ago

Yeah, I see the chat transcript as an important part of the work, and worth recording. I've taken to linking to mine in commit messages, e.g. this one: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/e781e4eef6efb28b5a2b8b00d49ac8dfaef3100b https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/e781e4eef... (My favourite feature of the new Codex desktop app is that it has a comprehensive "Copy as Markdown" feature, which I can then paste into a Gist.)

sciyoshi 5mo ago

This is essentially what Shopify did with River (https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river), and we built out something similar at our company. I'm sure the labs are working on this sort of thing - Managed Agents are probably the closest?