Restoring a checkpoint and an earlier point in the conversation

[liorshk]

It seems like there are 2 missing capabilities in the protocol right now but are available in the underlying CLIs:

“Restore to before this change/tool call”

When the agent has made a series of edits (fs writes, refactors, etc.), I’d like to let the user click a button like “Restore to before this step” and have the agent roll the session back to that checkpoint.

“Restore to an earlier point in the conversation”

Sometimes the user just wants to go back to an earlier point in the dialogue / plan (even if no files changed) and keep working from there.

Right now, different agents expose this in ad-hoc ways (e.g., gemini has checkpointing) but it seems like the current protocol doesn't support this.

[evalstate]

Agree with this - "double escape" has become a useful (and necessary) convention for working with Agents - would be keen to support.

[dhbrojas]

We would also love to see this feature! (branch out conversations, edit previous messages, etc.)

[jwflicker]

Seeing how Zed has some approve/revert (at least on Editor changes), i tried prototyping some Review/Revert behaviors for Eclipse.

I seem to be able to intercept fs/write_text_file calls and either capture a reference to the SCM/IDE History snapshot of affected editor/file before the first change or create a new backup if no one exists...

Looking at the terminal commands though for Move (mv) or Delete (rm) for Gemini, it doesn't look like the File locations values are populated fo rthe tool calls though. Maybe this can be fixed in gemini, maybe i can parse the title, or maybe if i enabled the terminal capabilities of the client i might be able to test each argument if it matches an existing file path...

Some of the challenges are:

• Both the user and the agent may make overlapping changes in real time
• The IDE has its own serialized Redo/Undo chain. (I opted to make the Revert make a new undoable change layered after the ones created by agents fs/write_text_file calls)
• Changes and reversions can be applied to the unsaved editor buffers. These can be saved, closed in arbitrary order. An agent-led rollback might need to go thru something like fs/write_text_file to affect any open editors.
• The IDE may have its own history snapshoting or SCM integration, would be easier to re-use it, than duplicating.
• Are there tool categories that cover anything that modifies the file system? I see move and delete, what about create? I guess if the agent has git integration, or uses terminal command to do mass find/replace, that would need something more like an SCM to track differences. So if we just potentially some of the potential modifications to the user (the ones we can catch) would that be confusing?
• Users probably already have an SCM which they can use for larger scale checkpointing / reversions

File and Editor Change Behavior #51

[jwflicker]

Can an Agent's checkpointing commands be exposed as Slash Commands

Also of note for Gemini, checkpointing cant be enabled using a startup flag:

The Checkpointing feature is disabled by default. To enable it, you need to edit your settings.json file.

Note: The --checkpointing command-line flag was removed in version 0.11.0. Checkpointing can now only be enabled through the settings.json configuration file.