I think that strictness will be the most important feature going forward. Whichever framework creates the safest boundaries for agents to work within will gain traction. That's why I think Effect has a bright future.
For this to work, you'd need to be able to replay the workflow after the fact. Spent last year and a half building an issue tracker that let's you replay the board and code. It lives in your repo and syncs via Git.
https://ljtn.github.io/epiq
I sometimes leave it on before going to sleep, instruct it to tag any deviations from the plan with a fork tag, and if needed a "human-input-needed" tag that I can filter for and review in the morning.
You might have use for an issue tracker I've been building the past year and a half. It lets you inspect diffs inline in the ticket, and replay the board to see how the workflow evolved over time via a timeline scrubber.
It stores issues as an immutable event log in your repo, so you can go back and inspect the context behind a change without having to litter the code with comments. Helps with traceability of intent.
Spent the past 1,5 years building a tool that might be relevant, helping keep durable task state between agent sessions. It is an issue tracker persisting state as immutable event logs, allows you to inspect workflows after the fact, lets you inspect diffs inline in the tickets and it is much more lightweight than Jira/Linear. There is no central service to integrate with, as it is Git-backed and lives with your code in your repo.
This looks really nice and I'm definitely going to give it a go. I been relying on Jira so this will be a breath of fresh air. Beads was great in principle and I haven't given it a look in a while but this looks much cleaner.
I have some older projects that use beads (I still run an old version without dolt that's imho pretty good overall) but lately with Fable also have a few newer projects where I just have the agent write docs and keep a worklog with the what/why/decisions etc. (I think I read it here on HN somewhere and figured I'd give that a try.)
The latter seems to work pretty well for now (slightly better than beads) but I'm always looking for ways to improve it. This could be an interesting replacement.
I think it works well for tracking intent. I tell my agents to use a "human-input-needed" tag when there is a high stakes decision fork, and then I just filter on that tag, immediately highlighting blocked workflows. I think you can get a long way with clever tagging, filtering + time travel.
Checking this out, the skill it wants me to add to my project seems to reference issues that wouldn't make sense in the context of my project. IE: `QPPR7PE` and `MBB6WY5` ?
You are totally right in that it makes no sense. It seems like the skill.md had regressed as I had updated it via agent proxy. Thanks for pointing it out, the skill has been brushed up.
Got it! I am not up to speed on Claude cloud sessions yet. Interested to hear how that works out for you. Let me know if you figure out what's getting in the way, I'd be happy to look into it.
> We still haven’t solved how to help people stay oriented as hundreds of increasingly capable agents change a system at once…
Building an issue tracker that addresses this. It can replay the workflow after the fact like a movie, and pin down the parts that require human input via tagging and inline diffs in the tickets. It is git-native, lives in your repo alongside the code doesn’t require any external service.
Once agents run autonomously for longer periods preventing vision drift becomes as important as correctness.
Epiq solves this with an architecture that supports workflow auditing, allowing you to time-travel state in a filtered view to reconstruct what happened, when, by who, and where intent started drifting, while also allowing you to correlate the evolution of the board with the corresponding commits.
For issue tracking you may also be interested in Epiq. It is git-native, vendor agnostic, and distributed. Comes with a command line TUI, a browser GUI, mcp, and more. Also event sourced state with replay, which is super powerful for auditing workflows.
Epiq also solves this with a git-native backend, so it is vendor agnostic and adheres to a issue-tracking-as-code paradigm. It is therefore distributed, has a TUI + browser GUI, mcp server, and so on.
It is also event sourced, and supports state replay from beginning to end, so very powerful for auditing workflows, whether that be your own or a swarm of agents.
reply