Your coding agent sessions belong in your codebase. Before I joined Entire, the company building the infrastructure to bring your agent sessions into your code, I was already exploring this exact idea on my own.

In January 2026, I participated in Genuary, a month-long creative coding challenge where artists, designers, and programmers make and share generative art based on a daily prompt. I used my coding agent, goose, to generate the creative code. For me, this was less of an exercise in creative coding and more of a self-taught lesson in orchestrating agents, since doing complex things with agents was on the rise.

One of the things I built into my process was a repeating workflow where, after every session, my agent automatically committed the session transcript into the same repository that held the creative output. It wasn't elegant, because it was literally a huge transcript with every tool call mixed in and almost no structure to make it readable. I did it because some of the creations were so astonishingly beautiful that I wanted my agent and myself to be able to look back later and have enough context to reuse those same patterns for future challenges.

Three months later, in March, I was working at a company that had built a far more elegant solution to the same problem. Instead of haphazardly dumping whole session transcripts, Entire saves each session as a series of navigable checkpoints. Each checkpoint is a snapshot of a meaningful moment in the session, capturing what the agent did, what changed in your code, and the reasoning that produced the change. Now after using Entire for a few months, I’m realizing that what I had treated as a nice-to-have for myself, I now see as a real necessity for engineers.

I had this epiphany while doing what my job actually entails, which is advocating for developers. I started noticing a pattern across the developers and community members I talked to. While many of them wanted to track their agent sessions, they did not want those sessions to live in the same codebase. Some people felt their sessions were too embarrassing, full of mistakes or moments where they had been harsh with their agent, because all of us have lost patience with a coding agent that just refuses to understand us. Others felt the sessions were too private. Because Entire already supports storing sessions in a separate repository and redacting secrets by default, I assumed we should be louder about that functionality.

Surprisingly, one of my teammates disagreed with me. His philosophy was that agent sessions belong alongside your code by default, and that the discomfort developers would eventually go away. Because I am trained to empathize with developers, I initially felt this stance was dogmatic, and I struggled to see eye to eye. Over the past few weeks, though, the idea kept ringing through my mind, I see his perspective.

Software engineering has never been about flawless first drafts. Our industry thrives precisely because we maintain a transparent, versioned track record of our technical evolution, and when engineers treat interactions with coding agents as ephemeral scratchpads, we end up ignoring a foundational principle of how software actually gets built. Every architectural and logical decision deserves a clear and traceable provenance, and right now that provenance is silently disappearing into chat windows.

I did some historical research on how deeply embedded proof of work is in our industry, and I learned a lot about what happens when we abandon that proof of work. Here’s what I learned.

Proof of Work in Mathematics

This foundation goes as far back as mathematics, the predecessor of computer science and software engineering. In the 1600s, mathematicians operated inside a genuinely toxic environment, settling disputes through public academic duels with brutal stakes. Winners kept their university chairs, while losers were publicly humiliated and often lost their livelihoods entirely.

Because the consequences of losing were so severe, practitioners routinely hid their formulas and hoarded their methodologies. That culture of intense secrecy produced constant intellectual property disputes, redundant reverse-engineering, and a fragmented ecosystem that ended up stalling the progress of the entire discipline.

The turning point came in the 1660s, when the Royal Society of London adopted a new motto, Nullius in verba, which translates to "take nobody's word for it." From that point on, mathematicians had to publish their complete, step-by-step processes in academic journals rather than only presenting final conclusions. In exchange for that transparency, they received institutional validation and undisputed peer credit, and the field finally had a shared ledger of truth.

Proof of Work in Software

Three hundred years later, software engineering experienced a similar reckoning. In the 1960s, code was a tangible, physical artifact. Developers punched holes into cardboard cards, organized them into precise decks, and fed those decks into a mainframe. Version control was physical too, because changing a routine meant pulling a specific card out of the deck and slotting a new one into its place.

Then, code moved to magnetic tape and hard disks and became digitally invisible. Multiple developers modified the same file and accidentally overwrote each other's changes without any shared source of truth. The industry's response was a slow march back toward visibility, moving from local file-locking systems like SCCS and RCS to centralized trackers like CVS and Subversion, and eventually to Git. Git decoupled development pipelines entirely through a distributed, non-linear architecture, but it was hard to use on its own, and it did not pick up real traction until GitHub layered a collaborative interface on top of it. That interface turned version history into a shared social ledger and defined the modern development workflow.

The pattern is the same one the Royal Society set in motion three centuries earlier. Every time our industry has taken a leap forward, that leap has come from making invisible work visible.

Invisible Agent Work

Agentic workflows are becoming the primary engine of software production, but they're abstracting away our work at the same time.

By committing only the final file output of an agent session, we aren't hiding our work the way 17th-century mathematicians did. But the effect is the same: we are back to delivering an end product while erasing the lineage of how it was reasoned into existence.

The prompts you write, the specific files your agent reads, and the back-and-forth debugging it takes to get things right are not just logs. They are first-class development artifacts. When we strip them away from a pull request, the rest of our tooling, our reviewers, and our future selves are all left to take the resulting code at face value.

That is exactly the position the Royal Society found unworkable in the seventeenth century, and there is no good reason to expect it will work for us either.

Nullius in Verba

Including your unedited session next to your code feels vulnerable, but so does pushing your first commit to a public repo or opening your first pull request in an open source project.

That discomfort is not a flaw in the workflow, it is the price of admission for a trustworthy, auditable record of how software actually gets built. Nullius in verba is still the right principle 300+ years later: take nobody's word for it, not even your agent's. Let the work speak in the place where the work actually lives. That is the direction we are building toward at Entire: making the context behind agent-authored work as visible as the code itself.

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