pickbrain

A search tool for finding relevant passages in previous Pi, Claude Code, and Codex coding conversations, memories, and project files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Searching coding history, narrowing results to a session or the current conversation, and inspecting the exact turns around a result.
Why use it?
It saves time when you remember discussing a solution but cannot recall which session contained it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/dropbox/witchcraft/pickbrain-codex
Any agent
npx skills add dropbox/witchcraft --skill pickbrain-codex
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dropbox/witchcraft

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 510 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 $0.00065 $0.00510
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00255
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00102
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00051

Measured 2d ago against content hash ae3a7731889a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pickbrain 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 2d 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.

skills/pickbrain-codex/SKILL.md · 74 lines

What it actually says

Pickbrain — Semantic Search for AI Coding History

Search past Pi, Claude Code, and Codex conversations, memory files, and authored files using semantic search.

Usage

Run pickbrain with the user's query:

pickbrain "$ARGUMENTS"

Pickbrain automatically ingests new Pi/Claude/Codex sessions, memories, and project config files (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and their @ references) before each search.

Interpreting Results

Each result includes:

  • Timestamp and project directory
  • Session ID and turn number — identifies the exact conversation turn
  • Matching text — the relevant chunk from the conversation

Present results as a concise summary. Quote the most relevant excerpts. To dig deeper into a specific session:

pickbrain --dump <session-id> --turns <start>-<end>

Filtering

Search within the current (calling) session:

pickbrain --current "<query>"

Search within a specific session by ID:

pickbrain --session <session-id> "<query>"

Exclude the current (calling) session from results:

pickbrain --exclude-current "<query>"

Exclude specific sessions by ID (comma-separated or repeated):

pickbrain --exclude <uuid1>,<uuid2> "<query>"
pickbrain --exclude <uuid1> --exclude <uuid2> "<query>"

Search only recent history:

pickbrain --since 24h "<query>"
pickbrain --since 7d "<query>"
pickbrain --since 2w "<query>"

Notes

  • First run requires a full ingest+embed pass (~7s). Subsequent searches are incremental.
  • The database lives at ~/.pickbrain/pickbrain.db.
  • Results are ranked by semantic similarity — they may not contain the exact query words.
  • The active session's JSONL is skipped during ingest if it was indexed less than 10 minutes ago. If the active session can't be detected, everything is ingested eagerly.
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. 2d ago First seen · 74 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A ae3a7731889a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pickbrain is a skill published in the GitHub repository dropbox/witchcraft (507 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 510 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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