I did find beads helpful for some of this multi-context window tasks. It sounds a little like there is some convergence between what they are suggesting and how it give you light weight sub tasks that survive a /clear.
> It sounds a little like there is some convergence between what they are suggesting and how it give you light weight sub tasks that survive a /clear.
I do see the convergence there. Beads gives you that "state that survives `/clear`," and Anthropic’s harness tries to do something similar at a higher level.
I've been thinking about this with a pretty simple, old-school analogy:
You're at a shop with solid engineering and ticketing practices. You just hired a great junior developer. They know the stack, maybe even the domain basics, but they don't yet know:
- Your business processes
- The quirks of your microservices
- Local naming conventions, standards, etc.
- Team norms around testing, logging, and observability
You trust them with important tasks, but expect their context will frequently get blown away by interruptions, meetings, task-switching, and long weekends. T handle this, need to make sure each ticket or note contains enough structured info so that when they inevitably lose context, they can pick right back up.
For each ticket, you'd likely include:
- Personas and user goals
- Acceptance criteria, Given/When/Then scenarios
- Links to specs, documentation, related tickets, or prior art
- A short summary of their current understanding
- Rough plan (steps, what's done/not done)
- Decisions made and their rationale ("I chose X because Y")
- Open questions or known gotchas
End of day Friday, that junior would ideally leave notes that answer:
"If I have total amnesia next Tuesday, what's the minimum needed to quickly reload my context?"
To me, agent harnesses like Anthropic's or Beads are just formalizing exactly this pattern:
- `/clear` or `/new` is like a "long weekend brain wipe."
- Persistent subtasks or controllers become structured scaffolding.
- The crucial piece isn't remembering everything, just clearly capturing intent, decisions, rationale, and immediate next steps.
My confusion about Anthropic’s approach is why they're doing this over plain text files or JSON, instead of leveraging decades of existing tracker and project-management tooling—which already encode this exact workflow and best practice.
_boffin_|3 months ago
> It sounds a little like there is some convergence between what they are suggesting and how it give you light weight sub tasks that survive a /clear.
I do see the convergence there. Beads gives you that "state that survives `/clear`," and Anthropic’s harness tries to do something similar at a higher level.
I've been thinking about this with a pretty simple, old-school analogy:
You're at a shop with solid engineering and ticketing practices. You just hired a great junior developer. They know the stack, maybe even the domain basics, but they don't yet know:
- Your business processes
- The quirks of your microservices
- Local naming conventions, standards, etc.
- Team norms around testing, logging, and observability
You trust them with important tasks, but expect their context will frequently get blown away by interruptions, meetings, task-switching, and long weekends. T handle this, need to make sure each ticket or note contains enough structured info so that when they inevitably lose context, they can pick right back up.
For each ticket, you'd likely include:
- Personas and user goals
- Acceptance criteria, Given/When/Then scenarios
- Links to specs, documentation, related tickets, or prior art
- A short summary of their current understanding
- Rough plan (steps, what's done/not done)
- Decisions made and their rationale ("I chose X because Y")
- Open questions or known gotchas
End of day Friday, that junior would ideally leave notes that answer: "If I have total amnesia next Tuesday, what's the minimum needed to quickly reload my context?"
To me, agent harnesses like Anthropic's or Beads are just formalizing exactly this pattern:
- `/clear` or `/new` is like a "long weekend brain wipe."
- Persistent subtasks or controllers become structured scaffolding.
- The crucial piece isn't remembering everything, just clearly capturing intent, decisions, rationale, and immediate next steps.
My confusion about Anthropic’s approach is why they're doing this over plain text files or JSON, instead of leveraging decades of existing tracker and project-management tooling—which already encode this exact workflow and best practice.