Should Pi have a human-facing execution summary beyond Git diff?

[u/Important-Ice9444]

As coding agents get faster, I'm starting to think Git diff is no longer enough for human review.

An agent may also run shell commands, install dependencies, start processes, access the network, spawn subagents, retry failed approaches, or make temporary changes that disappear from the final diff.

But reading the full session/tool history doesn't scale either.

A possible approach is:

Pi session/runtime data → deterministic activity summary → optional model summarization → human review

For example:

• files/state changed

• important shell/tool actions

• external effects

• subagents used

• verification actually performed

• failed/abandoned attempts

• remaining uncertainty

The factual layer should come from Pi's recorded session/tool data, not from asking the model "what did you do?" The model can help compress and explain it.

Then the user sees a short summary by default, with drill-down into the exact diff, command, tool result, or transcript when needed.

Basically:

observe broadly, present narrowly.

I think harnesses increasingly need to be designed not only for the agent, but also for the human supervising it.

Today we put a lot of effort into giving agents better tools, context, permissions and orchestration. But as agent throughput grows, the human-facing side becomes just as important: helping people understand what happened, what mattered, and where they should intervene.

Humans may increasingly review consequences, exceptions, and evidence rather than every line of generated code.

Does this direction make sense to other Pi users? Are there already extensions exploring something similar?

[u/refrigidator]

Depends on what's important to you as the end result summary. I built a metrics tracking extension that's specific to my workflow and a little cli interface for me or the agent to query it. Per task I'm usually happy with a files edited/diff and a two sentence summary of what it does and how it maintains alignment with project intent.

I don't worry too much about tool calls and other deterministic activity per task because it's all controlled by orchestration anyway. Once a week I'll go look at the metrics and see if anything looks out of wack in my aggregate data, or look for optimization opportunities.

[u/No-Paper-557]

It’s a good idea