I find the value of someone steering an AI session to be practically nil for nearly everything. Nobody wonders out loud how a senior developer arrives at the result he does without an AI; they care that his deliverable is high quality and meets whatever standard/requirement exists.
So I'm not sure why people going "chop, chop" and "nah make it more red and bigger" is a useful signal of much of anything.
No, the future is a complex "gate" that checks, weighs and measures everything before it gets committed --- a local (or remote) "CI" but... more granular and far more specific and turned to the needs of the project you work on.
We need to store CHOICES with the commit or branch. Not the whole session. Conscious, summarized choices
> Our hypothesis is simple: session logs are now the most important artifact in software development, and should be stored alongside the code itself in the repository.
Pi.dev has a feature where you can export the session as a html file and look at it later. I foresee that potentially you could store this in the same Git repository and get the benefit of reviewing how a particular code change came about during a session with an agent.
I guess the next step would be having the coding agent save that session context automatically in a folder in the git repository rather than requiring a human to export it.
This startup also seems to be operating in a similar space to tangled.org - moving code repos into a decentralised hosting environment.
Has anyone tried teaching the agents to use jj or gitbutler-cli to do their ideas of lightweight branches? I keep feeling like that would be a huge win for the multi-branch development I'm doing much more of with agents, but I haven't yet run that experiment.
I am anticipating a move away from git-style version control entirely.
One possible shape is something like unison-lang's CAS AST model:
https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/
This model has some significant downsides for humans, but less so for automatons. It eliminates some major problems of software development like merge conflicts, dependency hell, etc.
> Version Control Will Evolve for the Agent Boom
Isn't this the idea behind Yegg's "Beads"?
Anyone else finds the LLMs version control discipline lacking?
The engineering practices in general are lacking. Not tests nor assumptions validation ever, unless explicitly asked.
I suspect we'll move away from pull requests, because in the LLM world they're the worst way of accepting a contribution.
Verbose slop is painful to review, and it's dangerous to accept unreviewed code from a stranger.
For a maintainer it's way easier to tell their own agent to reimplement the same idea. It's still slop, but done their way, under their supervision.
For popular projects agent-made pull requests become a DoS attack. I wouldn't be surprised if projects start refusing to accept unsolicited PRs and switch to "don't call us, we'll call you". You could have an agent scanning forks of your projects to find what bugs users are fixing and what features they're adding, and use it as a roadmap, without the pressure of accepting any particular commit as-is.
I'd also like to move away from a binary merged-not-merged divide. Projects may have a stable manually-reviewed core that should be protected from agents messing it up, while allowing the sloppy parts to churn however LLMs like it.