claude-relink

claude-relink is a small read-only helper for finding missing or hard-to-locate Claude Code chats that match the current working directory and printing the command needed to resume them.

Use it when a Claude Code chat looks lost, missing from the /resume picker, or disconnected from the project you were working in, but the local Claude Code transcript still exists on disk.

This is especially for chats that no longer appear in the Claude Code /resume picker after you ran /clear or /new. Those commands do not delete the transcript — the .jsonl file stays on disk untouched. They just start a fresh session id, and the picker stops surfacing the old one. Run claude-relink latest or claude-relink list from the project directory, and it reads the project folder directly and ignores whatever the picker decided to show.

It reads local Claude Code storage:

• ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-cwd>/<session-id>.jsonl

There is no database. Each session is a plain JSONL transcript, and the session id is the file name. The working directory it matches against is read from inside each transcript (the folder name is lossy and is not trusted), so it still finds chats whose project path contains a . directory such as ~/.t3/worktrees/....

It does not edit, move, or delete anything under ~/.claude. It only reads transcripts and their modification times.

Using the Codex CLI?

If you use the Codex CLI instead of Claude Code, there is a companion tool, codex-relink, that solves this same problem for Codex chats — finding missing or hard-to-locate sessions that match the current working directory and printing the command needed to resume them.

It uses the same commands and usage as claude-relink. Install it globally:

npm install --global codex-relink

Then run it from the project directory whose Codex chats you want to find:

codex-relink latest
codex-relink list

Or run it without installing anything globally:

npx codex-relink latest
bunx codex-relink latest

Install

Install it globally from npm if you want the claude-relink command available everywhere:

npm install --global claude-relink

Then run it from the project directory whose Claude Code chats you want to find:

claude-relink latest
claude-relink list

You can also run it without installing anything globally:

npx claude-relink latest
npx claude-relink list

Or with Bun:

bunx claude-relink latest
bunx claude-relink list

All three forms use the current working directory as the project to match against local Claude Code storage.

Build

pnpm install
pnpm build

Latest Chat

From any project directory:

claude-relink latest

Or from this checkout without installing:

node dist/cli.js latest

The command finds Claude Code chats matching process.cwd(), selects the newest chat by transcript modification time, and prints:

  Copy the command below to resume your chat:

  claude --resume <session-id>

If there are no matching chats, it prints a short message for the current directory.

Pick A Chat

From any project directory:

claude-relink list

Or from this checkout without installing:

node dist/cli.js list

list shows an interactive picker, newest first. Rows are numbered so 1 is always the latest matching chat, and the picker stops at the oldest chat instead of wrapping around. Each row includes the number, updated time, short session id, and title or fallback. Press enter to select the highlighted chat. After selection, the accepted prompt line shows Chosen ID: <short-id> before it prints:

  Copy the command below to resume your chat:

  claude --resume <session-id>

Options

Show CLI help:

claude-relink -h
claude-relink --help

Use --claude-home when testing against another Claude home directory:

claude-relink --claude-home /tmp/claude-home latest

Normal use does not require any path flags; the current working directory is used automatically.

Related tools

tailings — for when you want to gather a directory's entire agent history into the folder rather than resume one chat. It pulls the sessions and memories that Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Gemini produced for the current directory into ./AGENTS.md + ./.tailings/, so the next agent — in any tool — is instantly caught up.

ai-hr — local AI employee performance reviews for coding agents. It scans your local usage history from Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode, normalizes token usage, estimates API-equivalent cost, and prints a report card for your AI coding workforce.

Author

Built by Warya Wayne, @waryawayne.

• GitHub: @WaryaWayne
• X: @waryawayne