Search AI coding history and find past decisions

When you remember solving a problem but cannot remember which coding assistant you used, search your local conversation history with Agent Dump. You can narrow results to a project, inspect the matching messages, and keep a cited excerpt for the next task.

Install Agent Dump using your preferred package manager. These examples run on the machine holding the source sessions. Searching works locally and does not require an AI API key.

Search for the words you remember

agent-dump --search 'auth timeout' --days 90

Every distinct term must match the session, but terms can appear in different messages or corpus fields. This is literal full-text search, not semantic search. The corpus includes normalized titles, messages, reasoning, and tool state. FTS operators such as AND are not interpreted as query syntax.

The default date window is seven days. Increase --days for older work. To find recently active conversations regardless of when they began:

agent-dump --search 'auth timeout' --time-field updated --days 7

Narrow to a project or tool

Run from your project’s working directory:

agent-dump --search 'database migration' --days 90 --query 'provider:codex,claude path:.'

The --query option adds filters. Its keyword component matches like --search: every whitespace-separated term must occur. --search also ranks results and shows evidence, so keep the search terms in --search and the scope in --query.

Locate the evidence

Add --locate --json to get message locations with machine-readable results:

agent-dump --search 'database migration' --days 90 --locate --json

Use a URI and message locator returned by this command. Replace both placeholders in the following example:

agent-dump 'codex://YOUR_SESSION_ID' --message 'REVISION:POSITION' --before 2 --after 3

This prints the matching message and nearby context. A session matched only by its title can have no message locations. A locator is tied to a source revision; if the conversation changes, rerun the search for fresh locations rather than reusing a stale one.

Read in the terminal

For an interactive reader, use:

agent-dump --browse --days 90 --query 'provider:codex,claude path:.'

Select a session and press Enter. Use / to search within the current conversation, n and N to move between matches, and t to show tool details. Press q to close the reader. This requires a terminal; scripts should use paged JSON reading.

Keep a small excerpt

agent-dump 'codex://YOUR_SESSION_ID' --message 'REVISION:POSITION' --before 2 --after 3 --format json,markdown --output ./excerpts

The exported excerpt keeps its session URI, locator, and message range. Check the reported output path and any diagnostics. The source transcript remains unchanged. Provider format restrictions still apply; Cursor supports JSON and print, but not Markdown.

If there are no results, shorten the terms, widen the date window, remove the project filter, and run agent-dump --providers to inspect source availability.