Yes, judges should not just look for bugs, they should also validate intent follow, but that can only happen when intent was preserved. I chose to save the user messages as a compromise, they are probably 10 or 100x smaller than full session. I think tasks themselves are one step lower than pure user intent. Anyway, if you didn't log user messages you can still recover them from session files if they have not been removed.
One interesting data point - I counted word count in my chat messages vs final code and they came out about 1:1, but in reality a programmer would type 10x the final code during development. From a different perspective I found I created 10x more projects since I relied on Claude and my harness than before. So it looks user intent is 10x more effective than manual coding now.