TaCoS: Generated Context Summaries for Task Resumption

Interruptions are a frequent challenge in software development, requiring developers to reconstruct both the mental and working context of their tasks. While prior work has proposed visual timelines or manual notes to aid resumption, these approaches require effort or lack support for mental context reconstruction. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to support task resumption through automatically generated summaries. We present TaCoS, an IDE-integrated tool that generates task context summaries from IDE and browser activity, combining inferred intent, implementation steps, and links to relevant artifacts. We evaluated TaCoS in a controlled lab experiment with 32 software developers, who resumed three programming tasks. Each task was resumed using one of three cues: a manual note, a timeline of recent edits, or a TaCoS-generated summary. The generated summary led to the shortest resumption and edit lag, and was rated as the most helpful cue overall. However, the timeline condition achieved the highest task success rate. Participants valued the summaries' structured, low-effort presentation of past activity, but noted that they often lacked forward-looking information, which was typically present in the self-authored manual notes. These findings highlight the potential of combining automated summarization with lightweight user annotations to support task resumption in development environments.

• Software and its engineering → Software development process management; Integrated and visual development environments; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI ; Laboratory experiments.