> With agentic coding, part of what makes the models work today is knowing the mistakes. If you steer it back to an earlier state, you want the tool to remember what went wrong. There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures. As humans we might also benefit from knowing the paths that did not lead us anywhere, but for machines this is critical information. You notice this when you are trying to compress the conversation history. Discarding the paths that led you astray means that the model will try the same mistakes again.
I've been trying to find the best ways to record and publish my coding agent sessions so I can link to them in commit messages, because increasingly the work I do IS those agent sessions.
Claude Code defaults to expiring those records after 30 days! Here's how to turn that off: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/claude-code-logs/
I share most of my coding agent sessions through copying and pasting my terminal session like this: https://gistpreview.github.io/?9b48fd3f8b99a204ba2180af785c8... - via this tool: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/23/claude-code-for-web-vi...
Recently been building new timeline sharing tools that render the session logs directly - here's my Codex CLI one (showing the transcript from when I built it): https://tools.simonwillison.net/codex-timeline?url=https%3A%...
And my similar tool for Claude Code: https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-code-timeline?url=htt...
What I really want it first class support for this from the coding agent tools themselves. Give me a "share a link to this session" button!
Right now:
- You can't interrupt Claude (you press stop and he keeps going!)
- At best it stops but just keeps spinning
- The UI disconnects intermittently
- It disconnects if you switch to other parts of Claude
- It can get stuck in plan mode
- Introspection is poor
- You see XML in the output instead of things like buttons
- One session at a time
- Sessions at times don't load
- Everytime you navigate away from Code you need to wait for your session to reappear
I'm sure I'm missing a few things.