I think we already have the tools but no the communication between those? Instead of having actions taken and failures as commit messages, you should have wide-events like logs with all the context, failures, tools used, steps taken... Those logs could be used as checkpoints to go back as well and you could refer back to the specific action ID you walked back to when encountering an error.

In turn, this could all be plain-text and be made accessible, through version control in a repo or in a central logging platform.

I'm currently experimenting with trying to do this through documentation and project planning. Two core practices I use are a docs/roadmap/ directory with an ordered list of milestone documents and a /docs/retros/ directory with dated retrospectives for each session. I'm considering adding architectural decision records as a dedicated space for documenting how things evolve. The quote fta could be handled by the ADR records if they included notes on alternatives that were tried and why they didn't work as part of the justification for the decision that was made.

The trouble with this quickly becomes finding the right ones to include in the current working session. For milestones and retros it's simple: include the current milestone and the last X retros that are relevant but even then you may sometimes want specific information from older retros. With ADR documents you'd have to find the relevant ones somehow and the same goes for any other additional documentation that gets added.

There is clearly a need for some standardization and learning which techniques work best as well as potential for building a system that makes it easy for both you and the LLM to find the correct information for the current task.