Chat History Search

Chat History Search

Exhaustive search across the two separate corpora of local Claude chat history.

Why this skill exists

The first time I tried this, I missed the entire Cowork corpus (1,674 JSONL files at %AppData%\Claude\local-agent-mode-sessions\) because I only searched ~/.claude/projects/. The user had to point me at their blog post documenting both locations. I also produced false positives by reporting TodoWrite items, <task-notification> wrappers, and document content read via tool_results as if they were Bryce's typed prompts. This skill encodes the full corpus map plus the verification rules that catch those false positives — so the next search is right the first time.

When this skill triggers

User intent that maps here:

• "find all uses of X in my chat history" / "every time I asked Claude to Y"
• "when did I last Z" / "inventory my prompts about W"
• "recover that conversation where we talked about V"
• "audit my sessions for U"
• "search my local logs for T"

Storage map — search ALL of these

Corpus 1: Claude Code CLI / VS Code (~/.claude/projects/)

%USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\<encoded-cwd>\<sessionId>.jsonl
%USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\<encoded-cwd>\<sessionId>\subagents\agent-*.jsonl

<encoded-cwd> is the working dir path with : and / replaced by -, lowercased (e.g. c--Users-Bryce-Projects-brycewatson-com). One project = one directory; one session = one JSONL file. Subagent transcripts live in a sibling directory matching the parent session UUID.

Corpus 2: Cowork / Claude Desktop local-agent-mode (%AppData%\Claude\...)

Two top-level names — the rename is in progress, both may coexist:

%AppData%\Claude\local-agent-mode-sessions\     ← current
%AppData%\Claude\claude-code-sessions\          ← migration target (often empty)

Under each:

<org-uuid>/<user-uuid>/<sessionId>/
├── agent/local_ditto_<sessionId>/audit.jsonl              ← top-level audit log (rare)
├── local_<cwdUuid>/
│   ├── audit.jsonl                                        ← per-cwd audit log (PRIMARY user-prompt source)
│   ├── .claude/projects/
│   │   ├── -sessions-<processName>/<cliSessionId>.jsonl   ← CLI subprocess session
│   │   └── <encoded-output-path>/<sessionId>.jsonl        ← outputs session (with queue-operation events)
│   │       └── subagents/agent-*.jsonl                    ← subagent transcripts
│   └── outputs/                                           ← (sometimes)

There is ONE <sessionId> directory currently per user — all Cowork sessions live under it.

What lives where — quick reference

JSONL line shapes — what to parse, what to skip

User-message shapes (the GOAL — keep these)

CLI / Cowork CLI-subprocess sessions — content is usually an ARRAY of blocks:

{"type":"user","message":{"role":"user","content":[{"type":"text","text":"<typed prompt>"}]},"timestamp":"..."}

Cowork audit.jsonl — content is usually a STRING:

{"type":"user","session_id":"...","message":{"role":"user","content":"<typed prompt>"},"_audit_timestamp":"..."}

Cowork outputs enqueue events — content is a STRING at top level:

{"type":"queue-operation","operation":"enqueue","timestamp":"...","content":"<typed prompt>"}

Look-alikes you must REJECT (false-positive sources)

These all serialize as "type":"user" or contain the search term but are NOT Bryce typing:

Search strategy — the order that works

Step 1 — enumerate, don't assume

# All CLI jsonl files
ls ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl

# All Cowork jsonl files (use find — directory is deep)
find "$APPDATA/Claude/"local-agent-mode-sessions/ -name "*.jsonl"

# Also check the rename target (usually empty during migration but verify)
find "$APPDATA/Claude/"claude-code-sessions/ -name "*.jsonl"

Count files containing the search term BEFORE deciding scope:

find <base> -name "*.jsonl" | xargs grep -l "<term>" 2>/dev/null | wc -l

Step 2 — categorize Cowork hits before reading

Cowork files split into 4 buckets — search priority differs:

# Build file list once
find "$APPDATA/Claude/"local-agent-mode-sessions/ -name "*.jsonl" > /tmp/all.txt
grep -l "<term>" $(cat /tmp/all.txt) > /tmp/hits.txt

# Categorize
grep "audit[0-9]*\.jsonl$"        /tmp/hits.txt > /tmp/audit.txt     # PRIMARY user-prompt source
grep "/-sessions-"                 /tmp/hits.txt > /tmp/cli_sub.txt   # mostly tool_results (low value for prompts)
grep "/subagents/agent-"           /tmp/hits.txt > /tmp/subagent.txt  # subagent transcripts (skip for user-prompt search)
grep -v "audit\|/-sessions-\|/subagents/" /tmp/hits.txt > /tmp/output.txt  # outputs/*.jsonl — CLEANEST verbatim

For finding Bryce's typed prompts: scan output.txt first (cleanest), audit.txt second (covers older sessions before output logs existed), skip subagent.txt entirely, skip cli_sub.txt unless you specifically want tool-call patterns.

Step 3 — parallel agent dispatch

For scopes over ~30 files, dispatch parallel Explore agents (NOT general-purpose) with each agent's file list pre-staged as a temp file. Explicitly tell each agent:

1. The exact files they own (path to a manifest text file)
2. The line shape they'll see (CLI array vs audit string vs enqueue string)
3. The false-positive checklist above
4. To return: file basename, timestamp, verbatim excerpt ≤300 chars, 1-line label
5. To order results by timestamp

Step 4 — DEDUPE across audit + outputs

The Cowork audit log fires 2–3 events per typed prompt (queue + dispatch + run), so audit counts over-count by ~2-3x. The outputs file's enqueue event is the canonical "what Bryce typed" record. When both report the same prompt:

• Use the outputs version's verbatim text
• Use the audit version only when no outputs file exists (older sessions, pre ~April 2026 in observed history)

Step 5 — VERIFY before reporting

Spot-check agent reports against raw grep before trusting them. The two most common agent failures:

1. Reporting <task-notification> content as user prompts (subagent task descriptions, not typed input)
2. Reporting TodoWrite item strings as user prompts (assistant-generated)

Quick verifier — extract only direct typed prompts from a single file:

grep -n "<term>" <file> | \
  grep '"type":"user"' | \
  grep -v 'tool_result\|tool_use_id\|task-notification\|TodoWrite' | \
  grep -oE '"(text|content)":"[^"]{0,250}'

Note: if a file uses content-as-array (CLI shape), the verifier needs "text":"..." not "content":"...". If audit shape (string), use "content":"...". Try both.

Issues encountered — explicit gotchas to avoid

These cost me time in the original search; calling them out so future-me skips the wrong turns:

1. Missing the Cowork corpus entirely. First search only hit ~/.claude/projects/ because I treated that as the only log location. Reality: Cowork writes a completely separate, ~10x larger corpus to AppData. ALWAYS scan both.

2. <task-notification> blocks misread as user prompts. Cowork wraps subagent-completion notifications inside type:user messages. The embedded task description was what the assistant told the subagent, not what Bryce typed. Five "Run adversarial visual QA with subagents" hits in one file turned out to be a single typed prompt plus four subagent task descriptions.

3. TodoWrite item content misread as user prompts. When Claude writes a todo list during /loop execution, items like "Final adversarial validation + lint/test/build + push" appear inside type:user events (as tool_result confirmations). Strict tool_use-id filtering catches them.

4. CLI session files use content-as-array, audit uses content-as-string. grep '"content":"<term>"' misses CLI matches because the user text lives inside "content":[{"type":"text","text":"<term>..."}]. Use a regex that handles both shapes, or run the grep against unpacked text.

5. Audit duplicates inflate counts. A single typed prompt produces 2–3 audit events (often visible as near-identical timestamps within 100ms). De-dupe by (session_id, message.content, ±1s) or just prefer the outputs file's enqueue event.

6. Cowork CLI-subprocess sessions are mostly tool_results. The .claude/projects/-sessions-<processName>/<id>.jsonl files contain Cowork→Claude-Code subprocess transcripts. The type:user entries there are almost entirely tool_results being passed back to the assistant — not Bryce typing. A search across 54 such files returned ZERO genuine user prompts in one verified pass.

7. The 117 subagents/agent-*.jsonl files have no user prompts. First line is the assistant's task description to the subagent; subsequent lines are the subagent's own turns. Skip entirely when searching for Bryce's prompts.

8. subagents/ lives inside the parent CLI session directory (NOT as a sibling). Path: <encoded-cwd>/<sessionId>/subagents/agent-*.jsonl.

9. The directory rename is in progress — local-agent-mode-sessions → claude-code-sessions. Check both. As of 2026-05-20 the rename target exists but is empty; all data is still under the old name.

10. Project names with -validation, -worktree-<adjective>-<noun>-<hash> suffixes are separate session corpora (validation runs, worktree sessions). Include them when sweeping a project's history — they may have unique sessions not in the main project directory.

Output format

When reporting findings to the user, group by corpus and present chronologically:

## Claude Code CLI (~/.claude/projects/)
1. <project>/<session>.jsonl  YYYY-MM-DD  "<verbatim excerpt>"   <use-case label>
2. ...

## Cowork (%AppData%\Claude\local-agent-mode-sessions\)
1. local_<uuid>/.../outputs/<id>.jsonl  YYYY-MM-DD  "<verbatim excerpt>"   <use-case label>
2. ...

## Coverage notes
- Files scanned: <N> CLI + <N> Cowork = <total>
- False positives excluded: <list of categories>
- Anything not covered: <e.g., subagent transcripts skipped because they don't contain user prompts>

End with a sentence confirming whether the search exhaustively covered all available local history (so the user doesn't have to re-ask).

What this skill does NOT do

• Pattern mining across sessions (use pattern-retrospective for that; the old transcript-analysis skill was retired 2026-09-06)
• Cross-session summary or retrospective reports
• Real-time monitoring
• Searching cloud-side conversation history at claude.ai (not on disk)
• Recovering deleted sessions (none of these formats retain deletes)