sessiongrep

You solved that bug last week. Your next agent session has no idea.

A local-first memory layer for CLI agents. sessiongrep indexes your Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, and Antigravity session histories into a single SQLite + FTS5 database, then gives you one CLI/TUI to find old work by topic, repo, provider, or recency. It also ships an MCP server so your agent can search its own history.

The real payoff is portable context: your session history isn't trapped in one tool. Work you started in Claude Code can continue in Codex, and an agent can recover — and even critique — its own prior reasoning across every tool you use.

Read the announcement: Sessiongrep: a local-first memory layer for CLI agents.

Why

Session transcripts already live on your machine — scattered across ~/.claude/projects, ~/.codex/sessions, ~/.cursor/projects as noisy JSONL with opaque filenames. The information is not missing, it's stranded. Humans don't want to read it; agents don't know how to retrieve it. Grep over JSONL drowns in tool payloads. Shell history captures commands but not reasoning. Cloud-synced or vector-backed alternatives bring secrets and URLs into systems that aren't yours.

sessiongrep keeps recall local. One static binary, one SQLite file, no daemon, no server. The index is a disposable cache — delete it and rebuild it whenever you want.

How it works

Provider adapters normalize Claude, Codex, Cursor, and Antigravity transcripts into a single Session model and write them into SQLite (WAL mode) with an FTS5 virtual table over transcript text, title, summary, and preview. Every read command runs an incremental reindex first — files whose mtime and size haven't changed are skipped, so search and list stay fast even as your history grows.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (1.70+)
• Claude Code, Codex CLI, and/or Cursor installed (for session data)

Build and install

git clone git@github.com:braincompany/sessiongrep.git
cd sessiongrep

# Install both binaries
cargo install --path .

This installs two binaries to ~/.cargo/bin/:

• sessiongrep — CLI and TUI
• sessiongrep-mcp — MCP server

Make sure ~/.cargo/bin is in your PATH. Add to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc if not already present:

export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"

Index your sessions

The index updates automatically — every command (search, list, tui, etc.) runs an incremental reindex before executing. No cron jobs or manual steps needed.

To force a full rebuild from scratch:

sessiongrep reindex --full

Quick start

sessiongrep list --limit 20        # recent sessions (auto-indexes on first run)
sessiongrep search "auth bug"      # keyword search
sessiongrep search "redis" --provider codex
sessiongrep search "datadog" --provider cursor
sessiongrep show claude:79accec8-5bf5-415b-a4a5-fe370eb2c998
sessiongrep resume 79accec8 --dry-run
sessiongrep export 79accec8 --format markdown
sessiongrep doctor                 # health check
sessiongrep tui                    # interactive browser

MCP server setup

The MCP server lets AI agents search and retrieve your past sessions programmatically — no copy-pasting context from old conversations.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --scope user --transport stdio sessiongrep -- sessiongrep-mcp

Codex CLI

codex mcp add sessiongrep -- sessiongrep-mcp

Verify

Start a new session and try a prompt like:

"Find my previous session where I was setting up Datadog metrics"

The agent will call search_sessions to find matches and get_session to pull in relevant context.

MCP tools

Config

Optional config file at ~/.config/sessiongrep/config.toml:

[providers.claude]
enabled = true
paths = ["~/.claude/projects"]

[providers.codex]
enabled = true
paths = ["~/.codex/sessions"]

[providers.cursor]
enabled = true
paths = ["~/.cursor/projects"]

[providers.antigravity]
enabled = true
paths = ["~/.gemini/antigravity/brain"]

[index]
db_path = "~/.local/share/sessiongrep/index.db"
cache_dir = "~/.cache/sessiongrep"

[ui]
preview_lines = 30

[search]
default_limit = 50
prefer_current_repo = true

Privacy & data

• Everything stays on your machine. No network calls, no telemetry, no cloud sync.
• The tool is read-only — it never modifies your session files.
• The SQLite index is a derived cache. Delete it anytime and reindex --full rebuilds it from your transcripts.
• All paths (database, cache, config) are user-local under ~/.local/share, ~/.cache, and ~/.config.

Limitations

• Resume delegates to the native provider CLI (claude --resume <id> or codex resume <id>). Cursor transcript resume is not currently supported.
• Claude and Cursor subagent transcripts are excluded from indexing to avoid duplicate records.

Status

Early but usable — pre-release, built from source (no tagged release yet). The CLI surface and MCP tool names are likely to stay stable; the on-disk index schema may still change (delete ~/.local/share/sessiongrep/index.db and let it rebuild if you hit a schema mismatch).

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. For bugs, please include your provider versions and a sessiongrep doctor output. For features, a quick issue to discuss scope before sending a PR keeps things moving.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.