codex-session-history-recovery

name	codex-session-history-recovery
description	Locate, identify, and safely summarize prior local Codex conversations from session JSONL when a user asks whether an earlier task, decision, or implementation can be recovered.

Codex Session History Recovery

Recover evidence from local Codex session logs without confusing injected instructions, tool output, or repeated context with actual user requests.

Use This Skill When

• The user asks whether Codex remembers or can find a previous conversation.
• A repository, URL, command, feature name, or outcome must be traced back to the session where it was discussed.
• A past implementation decision needs to be reconstructed from local conversation records.

Do not use this skill when the current thread already contains the needed exchange.

Workflow

1. State the boundary: do not claim personal memory of another thread before locating evidence.
2. Search the local session store broadly for distinctive, non-secret anchors such as repository names, URLs, feature names, or command names.
3. Treat raw text matches only as candidates. The same anchor can occur in injected AGENTS.md, tool output, quoted history, or a later summary.
4. Parse candidate JSONL and isolate actual response_item messages whose role is user or assistant.
5. Compare the real user requests, timestamps, session ID, and assistant completion messages to identify the relevant session.
6. Report the smallest useful result: session identity, approximate time, request, outcome, and a local source link when helpful.
7. Warn before exposing a full transcript if it contains credentials, incident details, personal data, or other sensitive material.

Evidence Standard

A filename match is not enough. Confirm at least one genuine user message and one corroborating item such as:

• the assistant's completion message;
• a command result tied to the requested work;
• a commit hash or repository state recorded in the session;
• a later user message acknowledging the result.

Separate confirmed facts from reconstruction. If only a candidate match exists, label it as unconfirmed.

Search Discipline

• Prefer rg for candidate discovery.
• Prefer structured JSON parsing over reading raw JSONL dumps.
• Search multiple anchors when common terms create noise.
• Do not print entire tool outputs merely to prove a match.
• Do not copy session files into a repository.
• Never include secrets in the response, even when they are expired.

See JSONL search recipes for compact extraction commands and false-positive checks.

Output

Lead with whether the conversation was found. Then provide only the identifiers and facts the user needs. Use a compact table when several exact fields must be compared; otherwise use prose.

If no session is confirmed, say which stores and anchors were checked without presenting guesses as history.