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hey HN - Claude pre-created users in Clerk with null emails/names as "guest users" on a contract job. Wasn't in any plan. The CTO asked why, and I didn't know! I didn't make that decision!
The reasoning was in a transcript on my laptop. Claude Code deletes those after 30 days by default. Two of my projects lost their whole history that way.
Grepathy distills transcripts locally into markdown committed with the code. Decisions only, never your messages, no server.
List every decision nobody approved:
grep -rn "agent-initiated" .ai/why/
Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
How did the CTO respond to "Claude did it and I didn't catch it"? Did the AI PR summary mention it? Or did the CTO just read the code?
The whole point of the agent is to make decisions for you. If you want to make every little detailed decision, just write the code.
The whole art of this problem is figuring out which decisions matter to you, and how to surface them.
(Disclosure: we're working on this too. https://tern.sh)
edit:
To me it looks like yours has the following negative qualities:
- closed source
- requires signup for some service
- says code doesnt leave my machine but this connects to your servers
- requires Goose AI as a dependency
- Baseline it. We mine previous logs, github comments, etc. for "what you care about." That helps pull out decisions that you actually care to read.
- Anchor to code. "The code enshrines this decision" is more interesting than "the agent self-talked this." Agents don't always self-talk decisions, and the thing that ultimately matters is the behavior in code.
This is not just Claude’s behaviour :)
It could be used for every agentic coding as well, because I have experienced such mess so many times in last three years.
One issue repaired, another one touched and changed…
For me this is basically the opposite of how it would need to be, the decisions are all in my messages to the agent, almost never directly in the agent's replies, sometimes indirectly though I suppose.
Interesting to see that apparently some people use these tools and are the ones listening and doing what the LLM decide and says, rather than the opposite.
> Ran a blind eval before shipping, published it including the misses (REPORT.md). Agents with Grepathy answered the "why" questions right. Baseline agents made up confident wrong answers.
Is this eval public anywhere? The whole ecosystem severely lacks transparency, and people continue making strong claims without any sort of data or results that backs these up. Is there any public somewhere backing up the idea that it's more accurate that just using whatever agent harness?
> Claude made a decision nobody approved
It irks me a tiny bit that this is essentially clickbait, you don't know for sure Claude "made a decision nobody approved" as you've lost the data because you never thought sufficiently about storing these things in the first place. Most likely it misunderstood you at one point, you didn't carefully read the reply and approved it all, so most surely what you've done lead to that being done. These big models hardly ever just randomly do whatever, you can more often than not trace it to something you did wrong.
Thanks for today's dose of impostor syndrome cure.
Wait what? Claude Code (and Codex) transcripts are auto-deleted??
That's a treasure trove of information for all my projects and I had built some tooling and workflows tahat deal with extracting insights from them -- withut ever realizing I mightbe losing old chats. Thanks for this -- I may need to include an archival step for retention.
Amazing to me how little these companies respect the historic value of the transcripts. Most of my work is captured in them now.
Throw that in ~/.claude/settings.json