[vel0city]

A number of agentic coding tools do this. Upon an initial request for a larger set of actions, it will write a markdown file with its "thoughts" on its plan to do something, and keep notes as it goes. They'll then automatically compact their contexts and re-read their notes to keep "focused" while still having a bit of insight on what it did previously and what the original ask was.

[cvzakharchenko]

Interesting. I know people do this manually. But are there agentic coding tools that actually automate this approach?

[sshine]

Claude Code has /init and /compact that do this. It doesn’t recreate the context as-is, but creates a context that is presumed to be functionally equivalent. I find that’s not the case and that building up from very little stored context and a lot of specialised dialogue works better.

[vel0city]

I've seen this behavior with Cursor, Windsurf, and Amazon Q. It normally only does it for very large requests from what I've seen.

[tom_m]

This does help, yes. Todo lists are important. They also reinforce order of operations.