Sessions

Sessions preserve your conversation history, tool calls, and tool results across restarts.

How sessions are saved

Every completed turn is saved atomically to:

~/.yottacode/sessions/<id>.json

Session ids are timestamp-like strings, for example:

20260426-150100.123456

There is no manual save step.

Each user message in a session also gets a per-prompt checkpoint capturing the conversation and any files the agent is about to touch. Open the picker mid-session via /checkpoints or Esc Esc to restore conversation, files, or both. See tui-slash-commands.md.

Token usage (input, output, and any prompt-cache hits) is recorded per turn alongside the assistant message and accumulated into per-model totals on the session. See /usage for how those totals surface.

List sessions

yottacode sessions list
yottacode sessions list --json

In the TUI:

/sessions

Resume a session

yottacode sessions resume <id-or-name>
yottacode --resume <id-or-name>
yottacode --continue                  # the most recent session in this directory
yottacode -c                          # short form

--continue (mirrors Claude Code’s flag) skips the picker and resumes the newest saved session whose cwd matches the current directory — useful for “I quit a few minutes ago and want to pick up where I left off.” When no saved session matches the current directory, --continue errors out with a hint. --continue and --resume are mutually exclusive; pass one or the other.

In the TUI:

/sessions
/sessions <id-or-name>

Runtime flags like --max-iterations and --yolo are not stored in the session. Pass them again when resuming if you need them. Mode state (auto / plan) is also not persisted: a session that ended in auto mode resumes in normal mode, same as Claude Code — use Shift+Tab to re-enter the mode you want.

Summarized resume

Large sessions can consume a lot of context before the first new prompt. Use summarized resume to carry forward the important parts compactly:

yottacode sessions resume <id-or-name> --summarized

In the TUI sessions picker, press s to toggle summarized loading.

Rename a session

yottacode sessions rename <id-or-name> my-feature-work

Names are convenience labels. The canonical identity is still the session id.

Export a session

yottacode sessions export <id-or-name>
yottacode sessions export <id-or-name> path.md
yottacode sessions export <id-or-name> path.md --force

Export writes a readable Markdown transcript with turns, tool calls, and tool output. System messages are omitted.

Search sessions with recall

/recall authentication

Recall uses a local SQLite FTS5 index at:

~/.yottacode/index.sqlite

The index is rebuilt/backfilled automatically from saved session files.

Clear vs delete

/clear saves the current session, then starts a new session with the same system prompt and memory. It does not delete anything.

To delete a session, remove the JSON file:

rm ~/.yottacode/sessions/<id>.json

Summarization snapshots

/summarize writes a pre-compression snapshot before rewriting in-memory history:

~/.yottacode/sessions/<id>-pre-summary-<timestamp>.json

Keep these files if you may need to inspect or restore pre-summary history.