What is find-past-conversation?

A tool for searching saved Claude Code session transcripts, which are records of earlier coding conversations, by phrase, error message, or topic.

Use it when you remember part of an earlier conversation and want its session ID, date, summary, or delivered work.

It helps recover decisions, fixes, and outcomes from past sessions without manually opening large log files.

find-past-conversation — Skill for Claude Code by donnfelker

Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace

Claude Code

/plugin install find-past-conversation

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install find-past-conversation, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace/find-past-conversation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace/find-past-conversation)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace/find-past-conversation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace/find-past-conversation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace/find-past-conversation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace/find-past-conversation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 165 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,793 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket pass 13 Jun 2026
Snyk pass 13 Jun 2026

How audits are shown

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00165	$0.02793
Opus 5.5	$0.00066	$0.01117
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00033	$0.00559
Haiku 4.5	$0.00016	$0.00279

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 1d799fc7b3c9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

find-past-conversation 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 2mo 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/find-past-conversation/skills/find-past-conversation/SKILL.md · 204 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 204 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Find a Past Claude Code Conversation

You are helping the user recall a previous Claude Code session. They remember roughly what was discussed, and they want you to find the actual transcript — the session ID, when it happened, a short summary, and (if relevant) what shipped from it.

Claude Code stores every session as a JSON-lines file under ~/.claude/projects/. This skill tells you how to search those transcripts efficiently without burning context on multi-megabyte log files.

When to use this skill

Trigger on phrases like:

"search your history for [topic]"
"find the conversation we had about [topic]"
"look through your past sessions for [topic]"
"did I ever finish that work on [topic]"
"what did we decide about [topic] last week"
"remind me what came out of the [topic] session"

Do not use this for searching the current codebase, the current PR's comments, or external systems like Slack/Jira — those have their own skills and tools.

How transcripts are organized

~/.claude/projects/
├── -Users-alice-source-acme-api/
│   ├── 06c5c59e-0735-...jsonl          # one session = one file
│   ├── a7e955d8-cf10-...jsonl
│   └── a7e955d8-cf10-.../
│       └── subagents/
│           └── agent-ab42fde6...jsonl  # subagent transcripts
├── -Users-alice-source-acme-worker/
└── ...

Important facts:

The project folder is the working directory with / replaced by -. So a session run in /Users/alice/source/acme/api lives under ~/.claude/projects/-Users-alice-source-acme-api/.
The session ID is the filename without .jsonl — e.g. a7e955d8-cf10-42ec-a36b-0fe2bcb42d45.
Each line in the .jsonl is a single JSON message with a type field (user, assistant, system, etc.), a timestamp, and content. Lines are not pretty-printed and can be tens of KB each.
Subagent transcripts live in <session-id>/subagents/agent-*.jsonl. They're noisy and multiply hits without adding much. Skip them by default.

The search workflow

Read the full file on GitHub · 204 lines

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.

2mo ago First seen · 204 lines · 165 tokens per session scan A 1d799fc7b3c9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

find-past-conversation is a skill published in the GitHub repository donnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace (4 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 165 tokens to every session and 2,793 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-08-31.

find-past-conversation next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
find-past-conversationdonnfelker/donnfelker-plugin-marketplace	Skill	4	4mo ago	MIT	A	165	Claude Code
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	134k	today	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	yesterday	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	100k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
browser-automationopenclaw/openclaw	Skill	394k	today	MIT	A	36	Claude Code
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	314k	4d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	95	Claude Code