There are ways to play around the single wall of test issue. Mostly, git lfs.

When it comes to “no dude stop etc etc” … that is valuable information. You can extract that and put down rules for agents so that you stop repeating it each time.

Same can be done at PR, so that you can review not just the code but also how you got there.

It’s trivial to go from session to a nicely polished html with side by side conversation.

If you want to try, username at gmail, I have a private repo with it running. I value critics, sorry for the plug ;)

Oh, on the different models side, i don’t see the advantage of reproducibility, or better, I don’t think I understand what you mean, can you help me see it?

I don't understand how "wall of text" is related to git large file support. The wall of text is a problem for me, the human. Sure, there are ways, like "be brief", caveman etc. In a large repo with lots of different people over time, I can't see how it won't just be wall of text again. It's just too much. TL;DR. And coz DR, the LLM will have buried bullshit in that text, which future session might read and "believe".

As for "no dude", no that can't be put down into rules. Not all of it anyway. We have stuff encoded in the repo wide md file, I have my personal one etc. and the various agents still don't do what we tell them to in all cases or a new model comes out and it no longer works. For example, for finding the root cause of a bug, it's very important to have actual proof and references. It's getting there w/ my instructions in the .md but it doesn't always work and I do have to "dude" it from time to time.

Is that back and forth valuable to have in files that are going to be part of the repo? I very highly doubt it. Having new rules that came out of the back and forth in a checked in AGENTS.md, sure, that is valuable.

I've seen enough PR descriptions created by the agent. Fluffy wall of text that looks good but is factually wrong. Seen it way too many times. Too many people just look at whether it looks good and then pass it off as truth. I'm tired of it and making that into "nice HTML" doesn't make it better. It just makes it look even nicer but not more true.

Re: reproducibility. My parent poster (and I guess you as well) wanted to have the prompt/conversation as "documentation". I don't see why that would be helpful. The only reason I could see would be for "reproducibility", which you won't get with an LLM. I don't see why else, but do tell me.

What I can agree could be valuable are the "why"s. I.e. the stuff that already should have been part of the ticket/requirements document. If you want to store that inside the repo as text files, instead of the original tickets or documents, that's fine of course. But I don't see how a "recording of how the code came to be" is valuable. It's like having a recording of all my IDE keystrokes and intermediate code state in pre-LLM days. Not valuable. What's valuable are the requirements and the outcome (i.e. code). Not "the thing in between".

Now don't get me wrong. Recordings of how people code/use their IDE can be a valuable teaching tool. Both as good and bad examples. And the same can be true for an agent coding session.