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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

#22

Post by matheusmoreira »

AM1010101 wrote: post #4

I would love a service that I could upload these chats to (anonymously) so that those developing open models can have it as training data and not just the closed model companies. My understanding is that it’s very valuable, look what cursor have managed to train. Obviously some filtering so that only chats or projects you want to share get shared would need to be in order.

I love this idea. I would totally upload my sessions if doing so helped train the next generation of open weight models. I'm using Claude to work on my free software projects so there aren't many secrets there anyway.

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

#24

Post by luca-ctx »

beaugunderson wrote: post #18
luca-ctx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol fair enough! Great project btw. Interesting choice to trigger incremental refresh on SessionStart hook, that's nice. How have you enjoyed the semantic search?

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 people I work with want to see what I did or fork one of my sessions, but I also don't necessarily just want unlimited dumping because I'm sure I have personal details in there too.

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

#26

Post by luca-ctx »

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 back to the raw session files, which bounds the benefit of not duplicating the data.

The main downside is flexibility (you would lose the ability to do arbitrary SQL queries, semantic search on top of structured corpus, etc)

But I would love to see if I can be proven wrong on this!

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

#29

Post by gb2d_hn »

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

I worked on this problem with https://www.agentkanban.io - this is a human in the loop integration for VS code that stores the context in the kanban task so it lives with the task (can also be forked, split etc).
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