Imagine asking your coding agent to plan an API change. You need it to find why an old compatibility constraint exists. It recovers the decision, then adds unsolicited feedback about how you approached the task. The context was welcome; the coaching might be an interruption. That's an illustrative case, but it captures a concrete choice in building Shifu: keep historical context lookup available while giving the engineer separate controls for proactive feedback. Shifu is the personal work-context engine I'm building for engineers using AI coding tools on existing projects. It brings saved decisions, reasoning and system context into planning, implementation and review. Reflection and growth are equally part of the product; the question here is when that feedback should enter a coding conversation. In the harness setup, we made growth feedback and decision alignment independent settings. Growth feedback is about constructive suggestions on your work. Decision alignment is about surfacing relevant support or differences from past decisions. Historical context lookup remains enabled when those proactive feedback options are off. A direct question about your approach can still get an answer. That last boundary matters to me. Turning off unsolicited coaching shouldn't mean losing the ability to ask why a past decision was made. And asking for a reflection later shouldn't require accepting feedback in every implementation task. The settings change the instructions installed for the coding agent. They aren't a guarantee that a model will follow them perfectly. I also don't have evidence that separating the controls improves retention or makes the feedback useful; those are things to test. For engineers using coding agents on an existing codebase: what's one intervention you'd welcome during a change, and one you'd want the agent to save until you ask? I'm especially interested in where a useful reminder becomes an interruption. I'm Shifu's builder: https://useshifu.com. Sharing this product decision for feedback; the API example above is illustrative, not a customer incident.   submitted by   /u/Spare_Bat_3040 [link]   [comments]