reviving-sessions

Reviving sessions

The desktop app's session tools — list_sessions, send_message, list_events, search_session_transcripts, start_session, set_session_title, archive_session — cover every session the app has indexed. This skill is for the ones it has not: sessions created outside it (claude -p, the VS Code extension, another account), transcripts stranded on disk, and transcripts too large or too old for its tools. It also covers the renames those tools get wrong on indexed sessions: one that silently changes nothing, or lands in only one account.

🔴 A session the app lists and is running: ask it, don't read it. Send it a message (mcp__ccd_session_mgmt__send_message, its local_… id from list_sessions) and wait for the reply. A transcript is mostly tool-call stubs, and reading it is your guess at its state; its own answer is its current view. (Shahar, 2026-10-20: "contact it, don't read its transcripts.") Looking up a running session's title or transcript id in the ccread listing is fine; reading its conversation to learn its state is not.

When to use

• A session is on disk but missing from the desktop sidebar, or a client shows sessions another does not
• A session vanished after its worktree was deleted or it changed directory
• You start a session from a shell and need it to appear, named, in the desktop app
• A rename fails, silently does nothing, or differs between two accounts
• A session has ended, or the app does not have it, and you need what it said or decided

Not for: routine work on a session the app already lists — message, read, rename, start or archive it with the app's tools. A rename that fails or differs between accounts is still this skill. Not for reading your own conversation, or grepping code.

First: is the app really missing it?

1  list_sessions                                    <- ALWAYS start here
2  find it by cwd + title + isRunning, and use the local_… id EXACTLY AS LISTED
3  ONLY if it is genuinely absent from that listing: adopt it (below)
4  VERIFY in list_sessions, never from a tool's return value