Assistant Panel: save chat to project

[NiloCK]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

This is not a fully formed idea. Maybe it's not good, but could be worth some consideration or discussion. Closely related to, but I think distinct from, #19002.

I have often found that there's a lot of useful context in terms of reasoning about the design and growth of a system in my assistant panel histories. But after commits are made, pull requests are opened, that context is lost other than as a vague memory for the developer and as history stored locally in that developer's editor.

It could be useful to selectively include some chats in the project itself. Say, in a ./.zedai or ./.llm directory.

One could imagine a workflow where an LLM traverses this history in order to produce a digest containing all of this context, Which itself could then be fed as context for future chats.

The chat history files themselves should be annotated with, say,

• the get commit hash at the time of the chat
• (optionally) edited so that the committing author's name/identifier is inserted for the generic user:
• model data

Environment

Zed: v0.163.2 (Zed)
OS: Linux Wayland ubuntu 22.04
Memory: 15.4 GiB
Architecture: x86_64
GPU: Intel(R) UHD Graphics (CML GT2) || Intel open-source Mesa driver || Mesa 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

EG, a save chat to project option here.

[goodlux]

This would be really useful! What I do now is have the assistant make a summary of the chat context, then park the summary in an md file that goes into git. This works me alone, wouldn't really really scale well.

I think to some extent this could be solved by git integration into the assistant panel (through MCP server and /slash) coupled with a really good MCP server implementation that stores all the chats.

It almost seems as though some new tech that runs parallel to git is needed ... with git you have the code development, which is intended to updated, forked, changed AND then you also have the running "log" of conversation between developers themselves and AI ... and this you don't want updated, you want it preserved, but summarized and accessible.

[au-phiware]

...AND then you also have the running "log" of conversation between developers

I 100% thought you were talking about git commit messages here 😁

When a commit is made after some back-and-forth with the assistant, I find it useful to have the assistant summarize the context and describe the change, and write the commit message. In my mind, these commit messages should form part of the context for future chats.

Another option could be to store the chat history as a git note. Notes are typically used to supplement a commit with information that wasn't available at the time of the commit and can take any format. But they can be attached to a tag, tree, file, or potentially another note.