One thing I would like is a tree-like chat structure like reddit / HN. Many times I abandon the direction things have gone but would like to resume at some ancestor or sibling response.

Gemini has something kind of like this. In a chat, click on the "..." icon next to one of Gemini's responses and select "Branch in new chat".

It creates a new chat which has the conversation up to that point and a link to the conversation you branched it from.

The UI isn't tree-like, though. It's more like Git where each branch name is just mixed in with the rest of the soup of references.

I'm not affiliated, and did not actually try it, but your comment reminded me of the juggler coding agent, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883305

>Each conversation is a Yjs CRDT tree. It can branch into sub-threads (recursively), and you can drill down, backtrack, edit, undo/redo, and inspect everything: tool calls, approvals, and the raw context JSON going to the model, etc.

I solved this with task management and got work trees.

The downside of course is branching in got, but I usually don’t go of course more then a handful of tasks.

I had to engineer my own ticket management to keep opus on target. It’s been great for managing work, history, audit trails and commits are tagged with the task id.

I implemented subtasks to deal with the way Claude likes to stage its own objectives.

Then I made enforcement logic in the task manager so tasks can’t be closed out until reviewers have consensus on the same sha.

The adhd that is Anthropic demanded I build it and now I’m knocking out issues faster than Batman.

Yes this would be very useful. Or at least being able to selectively compact a linear part and continue from before.

Often times I just sort of wish to undo.

You can do that right now in ChatGPT? Every answer has a "Branch in new chat" button. You can go back to any point and branch again.