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Atuin Threads: All your agent sessions on every machine

79 points linsomniac 2 hours ago 32 comments

RyJones 2 hours ago | parent

I've been using (and supporting) atuin for a while, and I find it a required bit of infrastructure. This is a nice upgrade!

petesergeant 2 hours ago | parent

I've spent the last couple of months putting a lot of time and energy into isolating my agents from each other: aggressive sandboxing, regular scanning of transcripts for agent-leaked credentials, per-agent encrypted credential stores, even physical (and network) separation of machines with different areas of work on them. Needless to say, as much as I have found atuin an excellent manager of my command-line history, I will be avoiding this.

ahmedketata 5 minutes ago | parent

yes agent leak secrets “Yes, and don’t ask again” in Claude Code would also save secrets in .claude/settings.local.json.

orbis-tertius 1 hour ago | parent

I love Atuin, but have some reservations about a shared server keeping all my shell history and agent sessions. Am I being too paranoid and missing out on convenience?

dietr1ch 1 hour ago | parent

Same, I really wanted to share history, but when I realised I was going to need to send things to a remote server I instead wrote a tiny script to search through backups that are shared across machines by Syncthing.

I just search over $BACKUPS/*/latest/local/share/fish/fish_history with grep and skim

orbis-tertius 1 hour ago | parent

Nice solution

turbocon 1 hour ago | parent

Atuin is open source, you can just host your own server?

orbis-tertius 1 hour ago | parent

Fair enough, I missed that. Will give it a try!

aaronax 1 hour ago | parent

It is encrypted client side. Or you can run your own server.

> Am I being too paranoid and missing out on convenience?

No, I'd say it is more-so a lack of reading the article that is causing you to miss out.

orbis-tertius 1 hour ago | parent

I did read the article but missed that. Paranoia can definitely co-occur with distracted reading, they're independent dimensions ;)

Thanks for the info, will give it a try

totetsu 33 minutes ago | parent

I cant get used to it taking over the entire screen when scrolling history

rao-v 27 minutes ago | parent

I faced this too! Turned out it’s an easy config change to limit to height of your choice

totetsu 40 seconds ago | parent

atuin config set inline_height 5

export ATUIN_NO_MOUSE=true

jwr 21 minutes ago | parent

But… you don't have to sync anything?

nzoschke 1 hour ago | parent

I started building my own version of this in Superlogical Rex.

It's a bit hard to decide where to hook in.

Rex has events, harnesses have hooks, terminal output can set program status, git has hooks.

I'm not sure I actually want every session from every machine saved. That's a lot of noise especially when half of coding sessions are experimental / throwaway.

But at the same time its not that much data that's easy to ripgrep / LLM through.

ellieh 1 hour ago | parent

Nice! Rex is super cool. We have an Atuin Threads integration for Herdr already, definitely exploring building one for Rex too

We actually don’t use hooks at all at the moment, and instead rely on parsing session files

Agents are definitely super good at searching and finding relevant data amongst noise!

justCallMeOmid 39 minutes ago | parent

"Half of coding sessions being throwaway" is exactly why I stopped keeping them per session. Mine hang off a work item, and each item has its own folder with its session logs. I basically throw them away and also record their summary in a vector DB to be able to find why I did something, if I'm ever curious about it! Otherwise I'm gonna need a tool to help me manage my sessions :D

ghempton 1 hour ago | parent

Built this for same purpose: https://github.com/codealong/codealong

More of a desktop flavor though

languagehacker 1 hour ago | parent

Probably a little late to this, because herdr has really eaten this segment. With their new Mac app, I don't see myself going back to atuin for this kind of experience. In fact, I get a little peeved using it on a vanilla terminal.

ellieh 1 hour ago | parent

Threads doesn’t compete with herdr, the two actually go together really nicely

Atuin indexes all your past sessions, herdr multiplexes all your present sessions.

We made a mod for herdr desktop to integrate the two: https://herdr.dev/mods/atuinsh/herdr-atuin-threads/

What peeves you on the vanilla terminal?

t0mas88 46 minutes ago | parent

I'm using atuin as part of my Herdr setup. Atuin is not a replacement shell or multiplexer, it's basically a really advanced shell history.

all2 1 hour ago | parent

Fascinating. I just finished implementing this.

https://github.com/comalice/pi-tools contains a 'memory everywhere' module that makes all sessions BM25 vectors, and surfaces a set of memory tools to enable agents to search. You can add a new machine to the mix by registering a 'spoke'. The app runs on the 'hub'. I want to containerize the core app soon.

You can also change which computer is the hub fairly easily.

TheIronYuppie 59 minutes ago | parent

I’ve been a supporter of Atuin and forever, and I really like her model here.

Excited to try it!

tacker2000 59 minutes ago | parent

So now everyone and their mother are putting out AI harnesses/session managers aka browser tabs for AI.

Nursie 30 minutes ago | parent

It’s likely because you can vibe code the bones of one in a few hours.

This week I got Claude to build me a browser-based session manager to keep track of sessions and history of tasks. Works well enough for me and I’ll add features as I need.

nklmilojevic 36 minutes ago | parent

posted on X a couple a days ago how atuin threads saved me from loosing the code I was working on and I accidentally removed uncommited worktree https://x.com/nklmilojevic/status/2118401844401541604

GNOMES 28 minutes ago | parent

Correct me if I am wrong, but I imagine this would hammer one's token usage to read past entries to resemble context across machines/terminals and models?

talloaktrees 28 minutes ago | parent

I've built this for myself, but not across multiple machines. It scans the session logs of all coding harnesses I use, one extra thing it does is create embeddings to allow hybrid BM25/semantic search.

I think these kinds of tools are on of the few times I've spent time "using AI to work on my AI tools" that was actually a good use of time.

It's so useful to be able to say "search sessions for the time I was working on XYZ 3 months ago"

all2 21 minutes ago | parent

I've done exactly this.

I'm also experimenting with a 'dream mode' that extracts facts, and a 'librarian' that stores those facts in the MD wiki.

I don't know if there's a benefit to that yet, but I'm going to find out.

amelius 27 minutes ago | parent

Aren't session also deleted after some time? It would be nice to keep them.

baskar12ai 25 minutes ago | parent

Yes i too faced the problem, lost valuable content across group of chat and not remembering in which chat it was. Tried searching but couldn't find it. Even asked ai itself does about the content whether it remembered.

ftchd 2 minutes ago | parent

I've gone a different route and prefer using the native harnesses (Claude, Codex), but with multiple accounts due to the limits.

In order to easily switch between accounts I've build Switcheroo, which I've been using for the past 2-3 months now. I've decided to open source it: https://github.com/FTCHD/switcheroo

Works with other AI CLIs like Gemini, and other various CLIs like Vercel (if you're managing multiple accounts like me), Netlify, Github etc