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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

#11

Post by scritty-dev »

dang wrote: post #5
scritty-dev wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

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

#12

Post by luca-ctx »

wrs wrote: post #6

I often tell Claude Code to look at previous sessions in ~/.claude and it’s happy to jq/grep its way through them with no special tool. But being more efficient is always good.

Yes this is how we started as well!

At first I thought the main improvement would be that the search would be faster, but rg is already pretty freakin fast when the fs cache is warm.

What really ended up being the big efficiency improvement is the token efficiency. When you structure all of the transcripts in a SQL table, the agent can retrieve exactly what is needed (such as "print me the lite transcript, without the intermediate messages").

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

#13

Post by luca-ctx »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #8
wrs wrote: post #6

I often tell Claude Code to look at previous sessions in ~/.claude and it’s happy to jq/grep its way through them with no special tool. But being more efficient is always good.

Claude has been heavily RL'd on using jq/grep, even if the tool is more efficient, Claude using it incorrectly or reading a book of examples in order to understand how to use it correctly is going to end up underperforming.

This is likely true, but ultimately this tool is just SQL, which I believe Claude and others must be heavily RL'd on. We try to not do anything "special" and make it boringly SQL representation of past sessions.

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

#14

Post by luca-ctx »

Terretta wrote: post #9

> Coding agents usually start from zero. They can inspect the current repo, but they often cannot recover the discussions, decisions, failed attempts, commands, and test results from earlier work. Sure they can. Just ask them. Some (like Claude Code) even have built in tools for it that work a treat. It'll happily rebuild an entire edit history diff by diff.

This is true, maybe we could reword it to be less absolute.

The bigger point is that when they do go spelunking in the old session logs, it is extremely token inefficient, and you can often fill up an entire context window and force a compaction just by trying to put together a transcript or summary.

The goal here is less of doing something previously impossible, but doing it in a way that makes it so efficient and cheap that you can have agents do it very often, like before they start on every single task.

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

#15

Post by luca-ctx »

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.

We have a private beta for a secure cloud version of the service, although its more geared towards teams/enterprise who want to share their work internally, rather than donating to open model developers. But interesting idea! I'm not very knowledgeable about crypto things, but I believe this is what people have considered "microtransactions" to be useful for.

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

#16

Post by luca-ctx »

beaugunderson wrote: post #10

This is rapidly becoming the "todo list demo" of the LLM era... I say this as someone who also built one because I was tired of all the others! ( https://github.com/beaugunderson/obliscence )

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?

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

#17

Post by Terretta »

beaugunderson wrote: post #10

This is rapidly becoming the "todo list demo" of the LLM era... I say this as someone who also built one because I was tired of all the others! ( https://github.com/beaugunderson/obliscence )

First, OP's tool is cool, and worth trying. Yours as well, though when I see a vibed tool with no commits I wonder if the author is still using it themselves or achieved perfection. :-)

Meanwhile, the other todo list take, one I've undertaken as well, is to cross sync all the Claude Codes across all its instances on all your machines.

There are multiple projects that claim to do this. None do it fully. (They particularly have blind spots to tools that embed a Claude Code, such as the Xcode 26.5 and Xcode 27 beta.)

So: roll one's own, and in doing that, realize that it has first class tools to make back referencing transcripts normal.

Given those tools, you don't really need an extra layer.

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

#18

Post by beaugunderson »

luca-ctx wrote: post #16
beaugunderson wrote: post #10

This is rapidly becoming the "todo list demo" of the LLM era... I say this as someone who also built one because I was tired of all the others! ( https://github.com/beaugunderson/obliscence )

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 if missing context would improve those scenarios going forward

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

#20

Post by beaugunderson »

Terretta wrote: post #17
beaugunderson wrote: post #10

This is rapidly becoming the "todo list demo" of the LLM era... I say this as someone who also built one because I was tired of all the others! ( https://github.com/beaugunderson/obliscence )

First, OP's tool is cool, and worth trying. Yours as well, though when I see a vibed tool with no commits I wonder if the author is still using it themselves or achieved perfection. :-) Meanwhile, the other todo list take, one I've undertaken as well, is to cross sync all the Claude Codes across all its instances on all your machines. There are multiple projects that claim to do this. None do it fully. (They particul…

totally, I see that syncing workflow come up quite a bit as well... some of this stuff is going to get sherlocked into the harness proper (probably a net benefit) though of course people are still going to want the meta-version that works with all of the different harnesses they use... so much of being effective with this style of development is molding it to your specific workflows and sanding off the rough edges with context, then sharing those wins with the larger team (another layer where I see a lot of differing approaches, like skillshare for example)
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