| name | session-search |
| description | Find context from past Claude Code (CLI) and Claude Cowork (desktop) sessions on this Mac. Use when the user wants to recall something they did before but can't find it , phrasings like "where did I work on X", "find that session where I…", "when did I last do Y", "pull up the conversation about Z", "that time I built/tried/discussed …". Searches by kind (code/cowork), time range, title, working directory, or free-text content across all transcripts. |
session-search
Platforms: Claude Code / Cowork and Codex. find_sessions.py and show_session.py detect the host (via the platform stamp install.sh writes, or AI_FIRST_PLATFORM) and route to the right store: Claude Code (~/.claude/projects) + Cowork transcripts, or Codex rollouts (~/.codex/sessions/**/rollout-*.jsonl). Both support list, time/cwd/title filters, and full-text --grep. Antigravity is not supported: its IDE conversations are AEAD-encrypted at rest (~/.gemini/antigravity/conversations/*.pb) and its unencrypted CLI store carries no parseable turn content, so the skill prints a clear "not available" message and exits.
Two scripts in scripts/ locate past sessions and dump their content:
find_sessions.py , discover + filter sessions (metadata + optional full-text grep).show_session.py , print a single session's conversation (user/assistant turns) in readable form.
Both read directly from disk , no API calls, no auth. They resolve paths from $HOME so they work for any macOS user:
- Claude Code CLI:
~/.claude/projects/*/\*.jsonl
- Claude Cowork:
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/local-agent-mode-sessions/*/*/local_*/audit.jsonl (sibling local_*.json holds title/metadata)
How to use
Start narrow, widen if needed. Prefer --grep for content recall; use metadata filters to scope.
Step 1 , find candidate sessions
scripts/find_sessions.py --grep "recruitee logo api"
scripts/find_sessions.py --title "rippling"
scripts/find_sessions.py --cwd "Recruitee"
scripts/find_sessions.py --since 2026-03-01 --until 2026-03-31
scripts/find_sessions.py --kind cowork -n 30
Combine freely. Output is a table by default; add --json for structured piping.
--grep PATTERN is a regex (case-insensitive). It searches message text inside every transcript and prints 1-2 matching snippets per session along with the session row. Use this when the user remembers a phrase or topic, not a title.
Step 2 , pull full context from a specific session
scripts/show_session.py <path-from-step-1>
scripts/show_session.py <path> --grep "logo"
scripts/show_session.py <path> --tail 20
The script strips tool calls/results and renders user + assistant text only. Output is markdown-ish; pipe to a pager if long.
Filter reference
find_sessions.py flags:
--kind {code,cowork,all} , default all--since YYYY-MM-DD, --until YYYY-MM-DD , by last-activity mtime--title TEXT , substring, case-insensitive (Cowork uses the stored title; Code uses the first user message)--cwd TEXT , substring match against the working directory recorded in Code transcripts--grep PATTERN , regex across transcript body-n, --limit N , cap results (default 50, 0 = all)--snippets N , how many matching lines to show per session under --grep (default 2)--json , machine-readable output
Tips
- If the user's description is vague, run
--grep with 2–3 alternative phrasings in parallel before narrowing.
- For Code sessions the "title" is a best-effort extraction of the first user message; for Cowork it comes from the
.json sidecar written by the desktop app.
- A session can have many transcripts (resumes, forks).
find_sessions.py lists each transcript separately; that's usually what you want , the most recent one is the live thread.
- Transcripts can be large (several MB). When dumping content to the user, prefer
show_session.py --grep or --tail over the full file.
