session-recall

Session recall: use sessionwiki as long-term memory

The user's machine has a sessionwiki index of every past Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI session. Treat it as the agent's long-term memory. It is local and offline - no network. Before solving something from scratch, check whether it was already solved.

When to recall

• Starting a non-trivial task -> search for prior work on the same topic first.
• The user references earlier work ("the auth flow we built", "last week", "that CORS fix") -> recall it instead of asking them to re-explain.
• You need to know which session changed a file -> trace it.

How to recall (run these, do not guess)

1. First time only, confirm the tool exists:

   command -v sessionwiki
   

   If it prints nothing, the tool is not installed - see "If sessionwiki is missing" below and stop using this skill for the rest of the turn.

2. Search prior sessions on the task topic:

   sessionwiki search --json "<topic keywords>"
   

   Returns an array of hits: id, tool, project, started, role, snippet. Pick the 1-3 most relevant ids.

3. Pull context from a promising session before acting:

   sessionwiki brief --json <id>
   

   Returns the session's title, project, date, and a budgeted markdown transcript. Read it; carry forward decisions, file names, and gotchas. Do not re-derive what the prior session already settled.

4. Trace a file to the sessions that touched it, newest first:

   sessionwiki trace --json <path-as-it-appears-in-the-editor>
   

   e.g. sessionwiki trace --json src/auth.rs. Returns sessions that touched the file (not line-level authorship) - use it to find the conversation behind a change, then brief it.

Rules

• Prefer recall over re-asking the user for context that already exists on disk.
• Keep queries specific: "jwt refresh retry", not "auth". Two-word topics beat one. The index matches substrings, so partial identifiers and non-English (e.g. Korean, including short words) text work.
• Cite what you recalled: "Found it - session 3f9c set the retry to 3 attempts."
• Recall is read-only. It never modifies sessions or code.

If sessionwiki is missing or a command fails

• command -v sessionwiki empty, or any call errors with "command not found": the tool is not installed. Tell the user once: "sessionwiki isn't installed, so I can't recall past sessions (https://github.com/youdie006/sessionwiki). Continuing without recall." Then proceed with the task normally - do not retry, do not block.
• A --json flag is rejected ("unexpected argument"): the installed version predates JSON output. Fall back to the same command without --json and read the plain-text result, or tell the user to upgrade sessionwiki.
• An empty result is normal (no prior session on that topic) - just continue.