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If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

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Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#251

Post by onel »

jwbron wrote: post #119
mandel_x wrote: post #2

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.

The former GitHub CEO has a startup and this was their first release. They call it checkpoints: https://entire.io/ I copied it for my own tooling to make it work a bit better for my workflows.

Have you been using it? How useful do you find it?

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#252

Post by handfuloflight »

ramoz wrote: post #11

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…

Why is this so complicated? Store a session id that points to the full conversation artifacts (off repo) with the git commit and look it up ad hoc as needed. Why do the conversations need to be in the git repos?

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#253

Post by stopthe »

No. Even further than that, maintaining AGENTS.md and the like in your company repo, you basically train your own replacement. Which replacement will not be as capable as you in the long run, but few businesses will care. Anyway having some representation of an employee's thinking definitely lowers cost of firing that employee.

That is a cynical take and not very different from an advice to never write any documentation, or never help your teammates. Only that resemblance is superficial. In any organization you shouldn't help people stealing you time for their benefit (Sean Goedecke calls them predators https://www.seangoedecke.com/predators/).

On the other hand, it may be beneficial to privately save CLAUDE.md and other parts of persistent context. You may gitignore them (but that will be conspicuous unless you also gitignore .gitignore) or just load them from ~/.claude

I expect an enterprise version of Claude Code that will save any human input to the org servers for later use.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#254

Post by kaycey2022 »

This feels woefully inadequate. It should be saving everything. Not just the prompts and replies, but also the tool calls and skill invocations. If that is too much, then why even save anything in the session?

Right now this paradigm is so novel to us that we don’t know if what is being saved is useful in anyway or just hoarding garbage.

There are some who (rightly IMO) just neatly squash their commits and destroy the working branch after merging. There are others who would rather preserve everything.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#255

Post by nubinetwork »

jumploops wrote: post #228
jedberg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point, I either jump back to new design/plan files, or dive into the debug flow. Similar to the plan prompting, debug is instructed to review the current implementation, and outline N-M hypotheses for what could be wrong. I'm biased because my company makes a durable execution library, but I'm super excited about the debug workflow we recently enabled when we launched both a skill and MCP server. You can us…

This is great, giving agents access to logs (dev or prod) tightens the debug flow substantially. With that said, I often find myself leaning on the debug flow for non-errors e.g. UI/UX regressions that the models are still bad at visualizing. As an example, I added a "SlopGoo" component to a side project, which uses an animated SVG to produce a "goo" like effect. Ended up going through 8 debug docs[0] until I was sat…

> giving agents access to logs (dev or prod) tightens the debug flow substantially.

Unless the agent doesn't know what it's doing... I've caught Gemini stuck in an edit-debug loop making the same 3-4 mistakes over and over again for like an hour, only to take the code over to Claude and get the correct result in 2-3 cycles (like 5-10 minutes)... I can't really blame Gemini for that too much though, what I have it working on isn't documented very well, which is why I wanted the help in the first place...

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#257

Post by ryan_velazquez »

If the agent is like a compiler, show me the source code.

I'm not sure about becoming part of the repo/project long term but I think providing your prompts as part of the pull request makes the review much easier because the reviewer can quickly understand your _intent_. If your intent has faulty assumptions or if the review disagrees with the intent, that should be addressed first. If the intent looks good, a reviewer can then determine if you (or your coding agent) have actually implemented it first.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#258

Post by serial_dev »

arppacket wrote: post #169
827a wrote: post #94

IMO: This might be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think so. Its much the same problem as asking, for example, if every single line you write, or every function, becomes a commit. The answer to this granularity is, much like anything, you have to think of the audience: Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to t…

While it's noisy and complicated for humans to read through, this session info is primarily for future AI to read and use as additional input for their tasks. We could have LLMs ingest all these historical sessions, and use them as context for the current session. Basically treat the current session as an extension of a much, much longer previous session. Plus, future models might be able to "understand" the limitati…

Or just "write a good commit message based on our session, pls", then both humans and llms can use it.

Re: If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

#259

Post by sethammons »

wolletd wrote: post #194
frank00001 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the spec driven approach. You should take a look at this https://github.com/github/spec-kit

> 110 releases in 6 months

Almost a release per work day, esp. if you count standard holidays.
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