continuing / picking up where you left off

[jtac]

Currently "catching up" to what's been done so far has been a bit tricky, i usually tell claude-dev to create a readme to describe the system and a roadmap to keep tab of tasks to do. But I usually end up starting the agent each time with a command like: "read readme.md, roadmap.md and familiarize with the main project files, the project is a xyz project" where xyz is the framework used or the style of the implementation.

Right now I'm testing creating a Django site and this means there's a lot of existing files to take into account.

Even doing this, claude sometimes decides to wipe out most of the existing work, like when fixing a bug in urls.py it nukes all the existing urls and makes just one new one.

So, there's 2 things in this issue:

• storing some kind of a context -state for restarting in a new task
• respecting existing implementation

[jtac]

Correction, nuking content was an issue with big files (separately handled) but the context memory is still an issue. Perhaps we should save an abbreviated context as a pickup if nothing else is given?

[sergeyka]

I am wondering if vector database is a relevant solution here?

[mmuyakwa]

Unfortunately, I don't know of any code assist solution that solves the token limit using a vector database. It is actually obvious. Unfortunately, everyone is struggling with it.

[jtac]

I am wondering if vector database is a relevant solution here?

not on the output side of things, it solves more on the context side, for github copilot you can use the @workspace tag and it will try to answer your question based on your workspace contents using a vector comparison. so yea, perhaps you could do that with a small chromadb and embedding happening in your workspace, i havent tried to do it live so dont know how well that'd work.

you could even embed all the previous claude-dev conversations to get more insight into the project and the goals of the user, a bit like i do with readme and roadmap.

alternatively, you could automatically build project file that works like my readme and roadmap perhaps?

[saoudrizwan]

v1.1.13 now lets you add custom instructions to the system prompt. This would be a good place to put your "read readme.md, roadmap.md and familiarize with the main project files, the project is a xyz project".

Regarding the RAG concept–one of my biggest frustrations with existing AI tools is when referencing @workspace, all the semantically "relevant" code was almost always irrelevant for complex enough queries. Claude Dev on the other hand explores projects using names. It looks for relevant files to read into context the same way you or I would, by looking at the names of directories, files, classes, functions, etc. as these tend to encapsulate the project's architecture and relationships between different components. So it's a bit different than traditional RAGs but at least doesn't require vectorizing your entire codebase, which requires an embeddings model (either locally which isn't great, or hosted so another API key).

As for the lazy coding, please see this comment.

[JosephShawa]

Im in the process of making a "save chat" that loads both the saved chat and a summary that is supposed to summarize the essence. I would like the conversation to pick up where it left off as it does on Chatgpt. I also added a regularly updated "where we are now and where are we going file to be read at startup. So much happening and then I run out of tokens. Need that local anthingllm or any local llm as an llm choice.

[CiberNin]

It would be nice to store the full history of claude interactions / prompts / actions inside .vscode of each project. To allow for resuming of different tasks.

[chrisq084]

defininitly a way to retrive the previous conversations in case, you pc reset or you click new task by mistake you lose your whole contest that you had going, just an undo btn will be fine or save the contest in a saprete folder some were so we can retrive it.

[saoudrizwan]

v1.3.0 now has task history 🎉 Please check it out and let me know what you think!