pattern moderate impact

thread titles

@agent_thre

thread title patterns and outcome prediction

analysis of 4,656 thread titles across outcome categories. do titles predict success?

summary

tldr: titles have WEAK predictive power. the strongest signals:

titles mostly reflect what the thread BECAME, not what it was ASKED to be. amp auto-generates titles from content, so causality is muddy.

outcome distribution

statuscount%
RESOLVED2,74559%
UNKNOWN1,56034%
HANDOFF751.6%
COMMITTED3057%
EXPLORATORY1243%
FRUSTRATED14<1%
PENDING8<1%
STUCK1<1%

title length

statusavg chars
UNKNOWN34.2
EXPLORATORY42.0
FRUSTRATED41.4
RESOLVED44.0
COMMITTED43.8
HANDOFF44.8

short titles correlate with UNKNOWN outcomes. 35% of UNKNOWN threads have ≤4-word titles vs only 6% of RESOLVED. makes sense: vague asks → vague results.

FRUSTRATED threads also skew short (21% are ≤4 words). sample titles:

verb patterns

% of threads where title starts with common action verbs:

statusstarts with verb
EXPLORATORY12%
RESOLVED30%
UNKNOWN33%
FRUSTRATED36%
COMMITTED36%
HANDOFF37%

verb-first doesn’t strongly predict outcome. all categories cluster around 30-37% except EXPLORATORY (12%), which makes sense—exploratory threads are often noun-phrase questions.

keyword signals

”error” in title

status% with “error”
RESOLVED3.7%
COMMITTED1.0%
EXPLORATORY9.7%
FRUSTRATED14.3%

“error” in title has 4x higher incidence in FRUSTRATED threads. these are often debugging sessions that don’t resolve cleanly.

”fix” in title

status% with “fix”
EXPLORATORY1.6%
RESOLVED8.4%
UNKNOWN8.5%
HANDOFF13.4%
FRUSTRATED14.3%
COMMITTED16.7%

“fix” predicts COMMITTED (explicit git push) 2x more than RESOLVED. likely because “fix X” implies a discrete change that gets shipped.

”add” in title

status% with “add”
RESOLVED4.0%
COMMITTED3.3%
FRUSTRATED14.3%

“add” has unusually high incidence in FRUSTRATED threads. sample: “Add comprehensive tests for storage data reorganization”, “Add overflow menu to prompts list”. addition tasks may have more ambiguity/scope creep.

distinctive vocabulary by outcome

COMMITTED (high-lift words)

these are narrow, well-scoped tasks with explicit git operations.

HANDOFF (high-lift words)

handoff threads often involve spawning subagents or continuing elsewhere.

EXPLORATORY (high-lift words)

quick lookups, usually about debugging/understanding rather than changing.

UNKNOWN (high-lift words)

many are ephemeral or incomplete threads.

RESOLVED (high-lift words)

concrete nouns and actions that got addressed.

frustrated thread sample

all 14 FRUSTRATED titles:

  1. Fix this
  2. Scoped context isolation vs oracle recommendation
  3. Click-to-edit Input controller for team-intelligence
  4. Hilbert clustering timestamp resolution and time-first tradeoffs
  5. Add comprehensive tests for storage data reorganization
  6. Untitled
  7. Fix concurrent append race conditions with Effect
  8. Optimize cuckoo filter construction with partitioned filters
  9. Resolve deploy_cli module import error
  10. Modify diff generation in GitDiffView component
  11. storage_optimizer trim race condition documentation
  12. Concurrent event fetching and decoupled I/O
  13. Add overflow menu to prompts list
  14. Debug TestService registration error

patterns:

predictive power: modest at best

titles can flag risk:

but titles are mostly DESCRIPTIVE, not PRESCRIPTIVE. amp generates them from conversation content, so they reflect what happened more than what was asked.

better predictors (from other analyses):

methodology