ccthread

ccthread — past-conversation archaeology

You have a CLI tool ccthread available. It reads Claude Code conversation logs from ~/.claude/projects/ and returns clean markdown. Use it whenever the user asks about past work.

Common patterns

Look up something from THIS conversation

ccthread show current                                # read the current session
ccthread search "<what they asked about>" --session current --window 3
ccthread show current --before-last-compact         # "before we compacted, what did you say?"

current resolves to whichever session invoked you — via the CCTHREAD_SESSION_ID env var, the parent claude process's argv, or the plugin's SessionStart hook if argv doesn't carry it. Use it whenever the user says "in our conversation", "before we compacted", "earlier in this session", "what did you just say".

Find a conversation by topic

ccthread find "<keywords>" --limit 10

Read a conversation

ccthread show <id> --page 1 --per-page 50

Paginate with --page 2 etc. Run ccthread info <id> first to see how long it is.

Keyword search with context

ccthread search "<query>" --window 2 --limit 5

Good for "what did we decide about X?" — returns ±2 messages around each hit.

Summarize recent work on a project

ccthread list --project <name> --since 2026-04-01
ccthread show <id>  # for each session you want to dig into

Stats / overview

ccthread stats --project <name> --since <date>

Tool usage for a session

ccthread tools <id>

Tips

• Session ids can be short (8-char prefix) or full UUIDs. last / latest resolves to the most recent session.
• --no-thinking hides thinking blocks when they're noise.
• --tool-details none hides tool outputs entirely (cleanest for summaries); full shows them untruncated.
• --include-sidechains inlines subagent threads.
• --json emits structured output when you need to re-process it.
• Default page size is 50 messages.

When to reach for this skill

• "what was that port/env/value we settled on in the X session?" → ccthread search
• "summarize last week on project Y for the team" → ccthread list --since ... then ccthread show <id> on each
• "make a skill from that process we worked out" → ccthread show <id> then distill into SKILL.md
• "update CLAUDE.md with lessons from recent work" → ccthread list --project ... --since ... → read → write
• "find where we hit that bug and what we tried" → ccthread find "<error text>"

Running ccthread outside this skill

This skill is all you need when you're in Claude Code — the dispatcher keeps a cached binary under ~/.claude/plugins/data/ccthread/. If you want ccthread on your shell PATH too, the project's install scripts drop it there:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakemarsh/ccthread/main/install.sh | sh          # macOS / Linux
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakemarsh/ccthread/main/install.ps1 | iex              # Windows PowerShell

Repo: https://github.com/jakemarsh/ccthread