The problem the author describes is real. Expecting humans to consume and reason about pages and pages of technically dense, oddly packed prose with pointers to many external files (tickets, prs, plans, code) is not feasible. Perhaps models can hold that context, but I suspect it is incredibly inefficient. No idea why markdown became the lingua franca for the text stream interface outside of the llm tool calls--one must enable flags to get e.g. json streams. What's worse, models treat such markdown content as ground truth, almost at the level of a system prompt, especially when they receive it from, say, a call to the GitHub mcp to read some issues.

I have been developing a workflow that is strikingly similar to what the author describes. Github's new pr UI is solving the wrong problem. Pushing up buttons in the dom is not going to solve the root cause, which is context overload, incorrect global state (MEMORY.md, stale/superseded decisions). I think we just need a decent openapi thing that can be parsed, tagged, and validated in manageable chunks.

The mailbox approach is exactly what I landed on as a first pass, but I'm sure one could develop much more sophisticated channels and a decent interface to work with them. I am waaay too obsessive to push one out, but looks like others are picking up on it, and my experience has been that these solutions usually become standard within months anyway. Just something I've been hacking on.