Make specstory git friendlier

[iRonin]

Currently I've got .specstory in .gitignore as everyone's files would be mixed in together.
If there was an option to somehow prefix the history or specify where to put the history, then everyone could store their history in Git.

[belucid]

Thanks for the idea @iRonin .

We are actively thinking about ways to make SpecStory more friendly to team environments, and have plans around this.

[jakelevirne]

@iRonin are you open to a brief chat about your workflow with Cursor and brainstorming the ways we could make SpecStory better?

calendly

[iRonin]

@jakelevirne if texting work for you then sure. I can tell you your extension saved me form loosing all the chat history in open Cursor instances after upgrading to 0.48.x today - I'm not the only one https://forum.cursor.com/t/lost-entire-chat-history-with-0-48-4-update/72313/7

[jakelevirne]

Thanks, @iRonin ! It's saved us a few times from that same type of disaster.

Here's as good as anywhere to ask you a few questions:

1. What would you want to do with your SpecStory history in git? Is it mainly just a matter of having a safe backup? Would you ideally want to review chat history side by side with the code changes for a specific commit or PR?

2. Are you using SpecStory while you're collaborating on a repo with other people? Is it a mix of roles (e.g. designers, developers, product managers, customers)?

3. What would you ideally wish SpecStory or Cursor would do to make your life better, or to make your team's or customer's life better?

[elazar]

Not sure if this is related, but it seems like SpecStory keeps trying to add .specstory/.what-is-this.md to my local repo's .gitignore even though I have ~/.gitconfig pointing core.excludesFile to ~/.gitignore and that contains a .specstory entry.

[ryenski]

Same here - I've got an entry in ~/.gitignore and do not want to add this entry to my project .gitignore

[jbanning-oreilly]

Hi @jakelevirne and @belucid! Thanks for creating this extension! It makes extracting & saving chats from VSCode's chatSessions JSON much more convenient.

On the topic of making specstory git friendlier, being able to change where specstory saves chats would help by preventing specstory adding files in my git repos. As far as I know, I'm the only one using specstory in a particular codebase, so I'd prefer keeping my chats local than having them stored in the repo. If that's something you'd consider adding, let me know and I'll open a feature request for it.

[daviddwlee84]

I have similar issue when I want specific chat history to stay in its feature branch. (using Curaor)
If I checkout to another branch, SpecStory will treat it as missing and fill all the chat history back again.
Which is hard to check which chat belongs to which feature/branch, and hard to checkout branch since it will always exist uncommitted new files.
Currently my workaround is to put .specstory in .gitignore and manually force git add chat history. Or simply do not use branch (main-only) on some toy project.

[bobbyinfj]

Big fan of specstory as well. I collaborate with 1-2 others on projects on github, where we check in our specstory history all the time as opposed to using .gitignore. Current painpoint when using it with Cursor chat (heavily) is there is always some late specstory that needs to get added to the commit history (oftentimes after the branch has already been merged). Ideally, there would be someway to keep this seamless, however, not sure what that is. I'm still happy to have the history, as it helps expose the contributor's intent when making changes.

[jakelevirne]

@bobbyinfj thx! Yes, we experience that pain as well. The root of it is how frequently Cursor flushes to the SQLite database. We've tried a few different approaches to mitigate that delay but none of them are foolproof.

We're working right now on other ways to match up histories with their resulting code changes / commits even after the fact. It would be like an alternate approach to checking in all the histories, partly to overcome the timing issue and partly because some people have expressed reservations around committing / sharing their entire chat history and preferring to instead share some derived summaries off of those histories, but still wanted them matched up to commits.

It would be great if we could hop on a call and share some of our early work on history<>commit mapping and maybe learn more about the projects your working on.

Here's our research calendar, if you're up for it: https://calendly.com/jake-specstory/30min