alive:session-history

alive:session-history is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from alivecontext/alive. It costs 76 tokens per session (3,171 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A session-history tool for browsing recent coding-agent conversations and finding past sessions by topic. It can show saved session details and revive a session's full transcript, including messages and tool results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review recent activity, search across sessions, find discussions about a subject, or continue work from an earlier session.
Why use it?
It helps recover context when you do not remember which session contained a decision, discussion, or piece of work. This avoids manually opening old conversations one by one.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the alive plugin — 17 skills, 5 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alivecontext/alive/session-history
Any agent
npx skills add alivecontext/alive --skill session-history
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivecontext/alive

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install alive, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills, 5 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for alive:session-history

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivecontext/alive/session-history.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivecontext/alive/session-history)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivecontext/alive/session-history"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivecontext/alive/session-history.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,171 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00076 $0.03171
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01586
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00634
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00317

Measured 4d ago against content hash 78f3375a9cac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alive:session-history scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/alive/skills/session-history/SKILL.md · 319 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 319 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

History

Session timeline and recent activity. The system's short-term memory.

Not a search (that's find — searches content across walnuts). History searches SESSIONS — what squirrels did, what was discussed, what was decided. For deep context extraction from source material, use alive:mine-for-context.


How It Works

Two tiers of data. Always start with tier 1. Go to tier 2 via revive.

Tier 1 — Squirrel Entries (.alive/_squirrels/*.yaml, with fallback to per-walnut _kernel/_squirrels/*.yaml) Structured, fast, indexed. Session ID, walnut, model, timestamps, stash items, transcript path. Every squirrel leaves one of these.

Tier 2 — Session Transcripts (path stored in squirrel YAML transcript:) The full conversation. Every message, every agent response, every tool call, every result. This is the deep context — the actual thinking, the back-and-forth, the nuance that didn't make it into the stash.


Modes

Browse (no args)

Show recent sessions across all walnuts. Default filter: only show sessions with saves > 0 or non-empty stash. Cap at 10 results. Add a summary line: "N empty shells not shown." Use history --shells to include them.

Data source: prefer .alive/_index.yaml recent_sessions: as primary data. Fall back to direct .alive/_squirrels/ YAML walk only if the index is missing or returns fewer results than requested.

╭─ squirrel history — recent sessions
│
│   1. 2a8c95e9  nova-station     today       opus-4-6
│      System architecture, telemetry pipeline, 8 modules configured, shipped v0.1-beta
│
│   2. a44d04aa  nova-station     yesterday   opus-4-6
│      Supply chain mapped, vendor shortlist locked, timeline set
│
│   3. 5551126e  nova-station     Feb 22      opus-4-6
│      Companion app, test harness, integration v0.1-beta released
│
│   4. fb6ec273  nova-station     Feb 21      opus-4-6
│      Transcript extraction, dashboard built, requirements captured
│
│   5. 224e54bb  stellarforge  Feb 22      opus-4-6
│      stellarforge infrastructure, telemetry, comms, access system
│
│  number to dive in, or describe what you're looking for.
╰─

Read the full file on GitHub · 319 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 319 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 78f3375a9cac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alive:session-history is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivecontext/alive (127 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,171 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

cco-overhead

Audit the fixed context overhead every session starts with — system prompt, MCP tools, agents, CLAUDE.md, memory — measured from real transcript usage.

egorfedorov/claude-context-optimizer · 34 tokens

handoff

Create a session briefing for the next session — auto-loaded, then archived. Use when the user is wrapping up a session, says "save this for next time", "hand off", "brief the next session", or wants to ensure continuity before stopping work.

edimuj/claude-mneme · 55 tokens

forget

Remove entries from remembered items. Use when the user wants to delete, remove, or clear a previously remembered item, or says "forget this", "remove that memory", or "clear my preferences".

edimuj/claude-mneme · 42 tokens

recall

Inject filtered context from previous sessions. Use when the user says "recall", "what happened last session", "what did we work on", "inject previous context", or when you need context from a prior session to continue work. Also useful mid-session when the user references prior work you don't have context for.

edimuj/claude-mneme · 66 tokens

remember

Save something to memory for future sessions. Use when the user says "remember this", "save for later", "don't forget", or wants to persist any preference, fact, lesson, or note across sessions.

edimuj/claude-mneme · 44 tokens

status

Check plugin health and diagnose issues. Use when the user asks about mneme health, memory status, plugin errors, wants to troubleshoot memory issues, or sees error warnings at session start.

edimuj/claude-mneme · 39 tokens