A new question which started bugging me recently is how, if I start allowing my AI to make more and more edits in my “second brain”-type notes archive, can I tell what’s what, i.e. what changes did the agent make and which ones did I make. For whole notes, the answer lies in the diffs. That is, either I store the next version and am that version’s author, or the agent does and is therefore that version’s author. The diff implicitly tells us what that particular edit consisted of.

Now today I took part in a discussion about - amongst other things - identifying after the fact whether code has been written by AI. Primed by my earlier thoughts, I quickly converged on the following idea.

We can use git (I know, there is nothing new under the sun) to track each and every edit the agent makes as a commit - under its own git handle. I think this might be counterintuitive at first — to have such fine-grained commits, that is, so many of them — but of course we have LLMs to parse through the mess later. But it’s clear what it gives us: it is one way to solve the attribution problem

(In case you wonder: agent harnesses provide the means to intercept tool calls, so the part about how to make the automatic commits is trivial.)