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Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

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Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#31

Post by beaugunderson »

luca-ctx wrote: post #24
beaugunderson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

semantic search has been pretty good, it usually finds what it's looking for! a couple of times I was certain that there was a session that contained some word but in reality it was in my personal claude.ai web account, so needed to add the import functionality there. my favorite piece is the `corrections` command which surfaces all my frustrations/corrections in the last week for example... and I can then figure out…

Nice, yea I typically spend about 1/3 of my sessions on finding ways to improve the agents' SDLC. Lots of random audits and things. And yea on the import thing, there are quite a few instances when session records can live on other machines, like cloud agents, dev boxes, etc. Do you have any interest in sharing some transcripts with team members? I'm trying to figure out the shape of this solution because often times…

sometimes i'll share prompts but but never a whole transcript (have not had a reason to)

if i do want to share context i'll use something like "give me a prompt $coworker can share with their claude to continue this work"

Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#34

Post by meowface »

scritty-dev wrote: post #11
dang wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

my post are not AI generated...I apologize if my tone/vernacular comes off as generated, but that's just my own voice. down voting my comment based on unfounded assumptions is upsetting and discouraging to a new member such as myself.

You did write the above comment with an LLM, though. Why are you now denying it?

Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#36

Post by mkornaukhov »

luca-ctx wrote: post #26
malandin wrote: post #23

Very interesting project! I guess it could be even better if you didn't have to ingest the session data into a database but just build an index on top. I have an idea how to do it

Thanks and this is a very interesting idea! We considered this, but the main thing you gain from this tradeoff is some disk space and cleaner retention semantics from not having to duplicate all of the searchable text. But you still have to do the parsing and ingestion work to build the index in the first place, so CPU time does not go away. And you still have to store the indexes and enough metadata to map results b…

We've been working on remote search indexing in our project and it works pretty good. since we are building a Postgres-compatible database, everything is pure SQL. I'd say we could join forces if you're up for it.

Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#37

Post by luca-ctx »

sinisha_djukic wrote: post #28

Really nice idea - there is certainly gold in the history of agent actions. But how do you keep the ctx from trusting stale history?

It's all in the skill / instruction that you give to the agent. The agent should treat the history as anthropology - a record of what happened, not necessarily the ground truth.

Creating ground truth is an orthogonal problem - I try to work hard to put it into specs and docs and regularly update those.

Searching history is closer to "super git blame" or like looking through logs. We should expect a lot of stuff went wrong in there.

Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#38

Post by dang »

meowface wrote: post #34
scritty-dev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my post are not AI generated...I apologize if my tone/vernacular comes off as generated, but that's just my own voice. down voting my comment based on unfounded assumptions is upsetting and discouraging to a new member such as myself.

You did write the above comment with an LLM, though. Why are you now denying it?

We can't know for sure, so it's best not to attack like this. All we can really say is that the posts were getting classified that way.

There's also a large fuzzy area these days where people are using tools to edit, "polish", etc., but do not think of it as using an LLM to write. This is particularly the case with non-native English speakers.

A few recent cases where this sort of thing came up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467726

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416592

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405497

Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#39

Post by luca-ctx »

mkornaukhov wrote: post #36
luca-ctx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks and this is a very interesting idea! We considered this, but the main thing you gain from this tradeoff is some disk space and cleaner retention semantics from not having to duplicate all of the searchable text. But you still have to do the parsing and ingestion work to build the index in the first place, so CPU time does not go away. And you still have to store the indexes and enough metadata to map results b…

We've been working on remote search indexing in our project and it works pretty good. since we are building a Postgres-compatible database, everything is pure SQL. I'd say we could join forces if you're up for it.

Very cool! Do you have any of it OSS? Or drop me an email: luca@ctx.rs

Re: Show HN: ctx – Search the coding agent history already on your machine

#40

Post by luca-ctx »

indigodaddy wrote: post #27

Or you could just use a great agent/harness like Shelley that already uses sqlite to store converians is searchable from the UI as well. https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley

We’re working on adding native support for Shelley!

The idea is that even with native recall from Shelley, ctx results are more accurate, ergonomic, and token efficient

For example search can retrieve a specific message and then window for trailing and leading N messages, in just a few hundred tokens

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