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.
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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.