lazy documentationv0.90

Importing Claude Code conversations

Lazy stores conversations — the reasoning, exploration, and decisions from interactive Claude Code sessions — as persisted development context alongside task data. Sessions for a lazy project are captured live (see below). This page covers importing other Claude Code history into the store: sessions that predate lazy, or that recovery left behind.

Adopting lazy on a repo that already has Claude Code history should mean inheriting that history as builder memory — not starting from scratch.

Live capture: two paths, both automatic

Nothing needs importing for sessions that happen while lazy is running — they are captured as they go:

Capture never shortens a conversation

The same session exists in several projects dirs, and a stale copy can be touched — mounted, refreshed — without gaining a byte. Storing such a copy would replace a conversation with an earlier snapshot of itself, so a capture whose messages are a strict prefix of what is already stored (same message uuids, position for position, fewer of them) is refused, and the refusal is logged. This is deliberately narrow: a conversation that genuinely diverged is still stored, because there the on-disk copy is the truth.

What is deliberately NOT captured

Lazy runs its own machine-generated claude -p one-shots — the PR/commit fidelity summaries on every accept, lazy report, and LLM memory compaction. These are housekeeping, not conversations, and would drown real builder conversations in lazy conversations and search. They are never captured, by either path.

They are identified by a marker that lazy's one-shot runner prepends to the prompt, so the session JSONL carries it durably. Detection is structural — marked at the source, not sniffed from prompt wording — so a real conversation that merely discusses the marker is still captured.

Local-command transcripts

Running a built-in slash command — /clear, /model, /compact, /login — makes Claude Code write three kinds of message into the session log: a fixed caveat telling the model to ignore what follows, the command invocation itself, and whatever the command printed. Nobody said any of it, so none of it is conversation, and it is dropped when a session is read.

Two things follow. A session made of nothing but local commands — the usual shape, because /clear opens a fresh log and typing /clear again ends it — has no content left and is never stored at all. A real conversation that merely starts with a /clear is stored as it always was, minus the boilerplate, so its one-line summary is the first thing you actually said instead of the caveat.

The line is drawn at "did a human type it". A command whose arguments carry your own words (/compact keep the focus on last night's run) is kept, and so is any message that merely quotes one of these wrappers while discussing it. Matching is on Claude Code's own tags, never on the caveat's wording, so a reworded caveat means a message is kept rather than silently dropped.

Only Claude Code's own built-in commands count as boilerplate. Your project's slash commands are kept, even when you invoke one with no arguments — /deploy on its own stays in the transcript. Claude Code writes a custom command exactly the way it writes /clear, so there is no way to tell them apart by shape, and the invocation is usually the line that explains why the next fifty messages happened. If a built-in ever turns up in a transcript, that is the same rule erring the safe way: lazy keeps anything it does not recognise.

One thing is not filtered: /context writes its report as an ordinary message with no wrapper around it, so there is nothing to match on that a human could not also have typed, and those still appear.

Cleaning up conversations stored before this filter existed

Filtering happens as a session is read, so conversations captured earlier still carry the boilerplate — they still list the caveat where your first sentence should be. lazy doctor warns when it finds any, and one flag cleans them:

lazy doctor --clean-local-command-conversations              # lists, changes nothing
lazy doctor --clean-local-command-conversations --dry-run    # lists and stops
lazy doctor --clean-local-command-conversations --yes        # applies

It prints every conversation it would touch — short session ID, start time, how many scaffolding messages it would drop, the summary it has today and the one it would get — and then, on a terminal, asks; the default is no, and a non-TTY is told to re-run with --yes. Nothing runs on its own, ever.

Each conversation is put back through today's reader, so the result is exactly what importing that session fresh would produce: the scaffolding messages go, the summary becomes the first thing you actually said, and everything else — your messages, the assistant's replies, the token totals — is untouched.

On its own it deletes nothing. Some stored rows are nothing but scaffolding (a caveat and a /clear, with no conversation around it) — a listing entry with no conversation behind it. Those are listed so you can see how many there are, and then left exactly as they are.

If you want them gone, ask for it explicitly:

lazy doctor --clean-local-command-conversations --delete-empty-local-command-conversations

Only rows whose every stored message is scaffolding are deleted; a conversation with one real message in it is cleaned, never removed. The flag is never implied by --yes, and the deletion is confirmed separately from the cleanup — approving the rewrite is not approving a delete. Each row is listed first with its short session ID and start time, on a terminal the question defaults to no, and without a terminal and without --yes the command refuses rather than guessing.

Deletion is permanent as far as lazy is concerned, and one thing is worth knowing before you say yes: a deleted row is not brought back by lazy doctor --reimport-conversations even if its raw Claude JSONL is still on disk, because today's reader drops that session as empty — which is the whole reason it is not worth keeping.

Other sessions lazy does not capture

The end-of-pairing session summary (lazy pair) carries the same marker, even though it goes through a supervised turn rather than a machine one-shot — its output already lands on the task as a turn, so capturing the session too is noise.

Deliberately-skipped one-shots never count as uncaptured, so the lazy doctor capture check below does not go red after every accept.

One-shots never become your resume target

Lazy also ignores its own one-shots when working out which Claude session a builder, lazy pair or lazy chat launch was running, and when lazy watch picks the session to follow. Without that, a housekeeping summary fired by an accept during your builder session could become the newest session file and be offered as the lazy builder --resume <id> target — reopening the housekeeping conversation instead of yours. Files lazy cannot read, or that carry no marker, are treated as real sessions: a redundant capture costs nothing, while losing your resume target costs the session.

Where a one-shot runs

Every machine one-shot runs in a throwaway container from the project's agent image — the same isolation as a supervised task turn (proxy, placeholder credentials, audit log). Nothing agent-shaped runs on the host.

Session state lands in a lazy-owned agent state directory (the .claude tree for Claude Code, .cursor for Cursor) at ~/.lazy/oneshot/<project-slug>/<config-dir>, mounted into the container — not your real ~/.claude or ~/.cursor, and not the daemon directory that holds lazy's tokens and credentials. The directory is stable per project, so one-shots do not leave a new ~/.claude/projects/ entry behind each time. Set LAZY_ONESHOT_BASE_DIR to relocate the base for every project at once. Write tools are disallowed.

Docker must be available — a one-shot fails loud with actionable guidance if the runner cannot launch a container; there is no silent fallback to a host spawn.

How long a one-shot may run

Every machine one-shot is bounded: a run is killed after ten minutes with an error that says so. A one-shot is a single model call — one prompt, one answer, no tools to wait on — so ten minutes only ever elapses on a call that is never going to answer, which is what an unreachable proxy or API endpoint looks like from the inside. The bound keeps an accept from hanging in merging and keeps lazy report, lazy ask and lazy memory compact from hanging your terminal.

A timed-out run's container is removed, so it cannot linger. Each command then handles the failure the way it handles missing authentication: memory compaction falls back to mechanical compaction (and in --llm mode fails while naming that alternative), a lazy report map unit is listed as a failed unit and the digest is composed without it, and a lazy ask excerpt becomes a warning on an answer built from the rest. A timeout in a reduce pass — the single call that composes the final answer — fails the command, because there is nothing left to degrade to.

Purging housekeeping conversations captured before the marker

Conversations stored before the marker shipped carry no marker, so nothing removes them automatically. lazy doctor --purge-housekeeping-conversations is the one-time cleanup for them:

lazy doctor --purge-housekeeping-conversations          # lists, deletes nothing
lazy doctor --purge-housekeeping-conversations --yes    # deletes

Without --yes it prints every conversation it classified — short session ID, start time, which kind of one-shot it is, and why it was classified — and deletes nothing. On a TTY it then asks for confirmation, defaulting to no; a non-TTY is told to re-run with --yes. Deletion is not recoverable from lazy (Claude Code prunes the raw JSONL on disk over time), so read the list.

This is the only place in lazy that classifies a conversation by sniffing prompt wording. That is acceptable here because the command is explicit, human-reviewed, and one-time, where at capture time — running forever, on every sweep tick — it would not be. Every rule is anchored at the very start of the conversation's single user message, so a real conversation that quotes a lazy prompt is never matched.

A caveat worth knowing: because these conversations have no marker on disk, lazy doctor --reimport-conversations will re-import them if their raw JSONL is still present. Purge is about cleaning up the store, not about rewriting what is on disk.

When live capture is not running

If the daemon is not running, its host-side sweep is not running either — the sessions stay on disk until a daemon is up or you import them manually. lazy doctor fails (not warns) when it finds sessions from the last 24 hours that never reached the store, because that means live capture is broken now:

✗ Conversation capture is live
  3 conversation(s) written in the last 24h (most recent 41m ago) are on disk
  but never reached the store — live capture is not running.

Sessions written in the last few minutes are treated as in flight, not as failures — the sweep may simply not have ticked yet.

What a builder session tells you when its capture failed

The first path runs on a 30-second timer inside the builder's container, where its only voice is a log file you are not watching. So when a builder session ends, it prints on your terminal what went wrong — once, after the Claude Code interface is gone:

Conversation capture failed during this session — some or all of this session's
history may not be in the lazy store, and `lazy upgrade` may not be able to
resume it:
  [builder] Incremental capture failed: Unable to connect. Is the computer able
  to access the url? [ConnectionRefused]
Check `lazy daemon status`, then `lazy doctor` for details.
`lazy doctor --reimport-conversations` can re-import from the session files on disk.

Each distinct reason is listed once, however many times it recurred. Beyond the first five the report says how many more it is not showing rather than truncating silently, and the full list is in that session's supervisor log.

Reasons carry the machine detail as well as the prose — the error code, and the underlying error when one was wrapped. Without it the most common failure of all reads as "unable to connect" with no address and no reason, which is not enough to tell a wrong port from an unreachable host.

One surface: lazy import-conversation

lazy import-conversation is the single surface for bringing Claude Code history into the store, per-session or in bulk.

lazy import-conversation              # Preview + import all new sessions
lazy import-conversation --yes        # Import all new sessions, no prompt
lazy import-conversation --list       # List available sessions
lazy import-conversation bc77e1b1     # Import one session (id can be shortened)
lazy import-conversation --all        # Re-import everything (incl. already imported)
lazy import-conversation --show-imported     # Show already-imported conversations
lazy import-conversation --show bc77e1b1     # Show a full conversation transcript

Where it looks (multi-root discovery)

Discovery spans every Claude projects dir for this repo:

When the same session appears in several dirs (seeding copies a session into each isolation dir), the most complete copy is used (largest size, newest mtime). This means a session that only ever lived in an isolation dir is still importable — both in bulk and by session-id.

Not to be confused with lazy builder --resume <id> --import, which is a different operation entirely: it decides which projects dir a builder launch mounts (adopting a session that has never run under builder isolation), and writes nothing to lazy's store. See One /resume list per project in lazy-agent design. Importing a conversation here never affects which sessions /resume lists, and adopting a session there never imports it.

Bulk import never writes silently

Running lazy import-conversation with no session-id previews what would be imported and asks for confirmation before writing:

Found 5 session(s) on disk; 3 missing from the store, 2 already imported.
Import 3 conversation(s) into the store?

Pass --yes to skip the prompt (for non-interactive callers). On a non-TTY without --yes, it prints what it would do and writes nothing. Naming an explicit session-id, or passing --all, imports directly — the argument/flag is itself explicit intent.

Import is idempotent: sessions already in the store are skipped, and empty or unparseable JSONL shells are skipped rather than stored as content-free stubs. Lazy's machine-generated one-shots are excluded from discovery entirely, so no import path can resurrect them; when any are present the count is reported (ignored 2 machine-generated lazy one-shot(s)) rather than passed over in silence, and naming one explicitly says so instead of "session not found".

Recovery is the same flow

lazy doctor --reimport-conversations is an alias for the bulk path of lazy import-conversation — same multi-root discovery, dedupe, preview, and confirmation. It exists as a recovery entry point for stranded builder conversations (sessions that are on disk but never reached the store). The lazy doctor health sweep also detects conversations on disk but not in the store — a warning for old ones, a failure for recent ones (see When live capture is not running) — and points at this command; detection is report-only and never writes.

lazy doctor --reimport-conversations          # Preview, then confirm
lazy doctor --reimport-conversations --yes    # Recover without prompting

Using what is stored

Claude Code's own retention ages old sessions out of /resume; lazy's store keeps them. Browse them from the terminal:

lazy conversations                              # list (newest first)
lazy conversations search "design decision"       # search message content
lazy conversations show 4f8c2a1b                  # read one in full

lazy builder list shows the same table (first prompt column); lazy show <session-id> still works too. For structured search across the whole project, lazy search --conversations and lazy search 'in:conversations <text>' also reach conversation bodies.

In the browser

The daemon's web UI serves the same conversations under Conversations in the nav (the dashboard's address is printed by lazy daemon status):

Conversations are captured, never authored here: nothing you do on these pages edits a transcript. The one thing they let you create is a task, from part of a transcript — see below. Everything works with JavaScript turned off. Lazy Teams shows the same two pages for a project, so the record reads the same either way.

The Conversations nav entry carries a badge counting what has been captured since you last opened the listing. That mark lives in your browser rather than in the store — conversations have no read state — so each browser counts for itself; see the nav counts.

Turning part of a conversation into a task

Decisions get made in a builder session and then have to be typed out again as a task. They don't. Promote the exchange instead — in the browser or from the terminal — and you get a backlog task seeded with those messages, verbatim, which you edit before anything is created.

You always name a range of messages, never the whole conversation: a session runs to hundreds of messages across unrelated topics, so a task seeded from all of it says everything and means nothing. Messages are numbered from 1, and both surfaces show the numbers.

In the browser, open the conversation and use Start here on the first message of the exchange and End here on the last. The selected run is highlighted and a form appears with:

In Lazy Teams, the same Start here / End here links are on a conversation, and the form is the same four fields with one difference: they start empty, and each says what it falls back to. Leave a field alone and that default is used — the goal from what you said, a code from the goal, the prompt from the messages themselves — so promoting there is two clicks and a button. Type in a field only to override it. Teams also cannot warn you about an overlap up front the way the single-project browser does; it tells you which other task shares those messages once the new one is created.

From the terminal:

lazy conversations show 3f9a01b2          # message numbers are in the transcript
lazy conversations promote 3f9a01b2 --from 12 --to 18

That prompts for the goal, code and parent, then opens $EDITOR on the seeded prompt. Everything that can fail — an unknown session id, a range the transcript does not have, a range already promoted — is checked before the editor opens, so you never type a brief and lose it to a validation error. --goal, --code and --parent set fields up front; --yes takes the seeded text unedited (scripts and non-interactive shells get this automatically).

The new task is created in the backlog and never started — promoting writes the task down, starting the work stays your call.

Promoted twice? You'll see it. Each promoted task records which conversation and which messages it came from, so the transcript page lists what has already been promoted out of it, and a selection that overlaps an earlier one says so before you submit. Promoting the exact same range twice is refused, naming the task that already exists. A long conversation legitimately yields several tasks, so overlapping ranges are allowed — just never by accident.

Asking instead of reading: lazy ask <conversation-id>

When you want an answer rather than the whole transcript, use lazy ask:

lazy conversations                                # find the session id
lazy ask 4f8c2a1b -m "what did we decide about retention?"
lazy ask 4f8c2a1b                                   # no -m: opens $EDITOR
lazy ask 4f8c2a1b -m "..." --json                   # structured answer

lazy ask takes either kind of id: a task id asks that task's live agent (see lazy ask --help), a conversation session id — full, or any unique prefix — asks the stored transcript. An ambiguous prefix is an error, never a silent pick.

Nothing is written back. A conversation is immutable history and an ask is a read of it: no turn, no comment, and the ask's own claude -p session is marked as a machine one-shot so it is never captured as a new conversation. The answer goes to stdout and that is all. The agent is locked down to match — it gets no Bash, Write or Edit, so it can only read the transcript it was handed.

Agents and the builder get the same thing as lazy_conversation_ask (session_id + question). Prefer it over lazy_conversation_read when you want one fact rather than the whole transcript — a long conversation read in full can overflow the caller's own context.

Transcripts too large for one pass

The prompt is passed as a single claude -p argument, and one argv element is capped at 128 KiB on Linux — that, not the context window, is the binding limit. A transcript over the 96 KiB budget is therefore split at message boundaries into consecutive excerpts: each is read for what bears on the question, and a final pass writes one answer from those findings. --json reports chunks and relevantChunks so you can see it happened.

Every degradation is reported rather than absorbed. An excerpt that fails to read, a single message too large to pass whole, findings that did not fit in the final pass — each comes back as a warning (on stderr, or in warnings under --json). If every excerpt fails, the ask fails; you never get a confident answer built from silently-dropped input.

Onboarding: lazy init offers to inherit history

When you run lazy init on a repo that already has Claude Code history, init detects it and offers to inherit it. This is deliberately one step, not two disjoint prompt blocks — adopting lazy on an existing repo should feel like a single "inherit your history?" question, covering both kinds of history the harness leaves behind:

This repo already has Claude Code history from before lazy.
  Found 4 existing Claude Code session(s) for this repo.
  Found 3 Claude Code harness memory record(s) with no lazy counterpart.
  Lazy can import both, so you inherit your project's history instead of
  starting from scratch.
  Import 4 conversation(s) as builder memory? [Y/n]
  Import 3 memory record(s) into lazy shared memory? [Y/n]

Each half of the offer appears only when there is something to import, so a repo with sessions but no harness memory sees exactly one prompt.

Detection stays cheap for both: the per-builder isolation dirs don't exist yet at init, so it's a single scan of ~/.claude/projects for dirs matching this repo, plus a readdir of each match's memory/ subdir. The memory count is filtered against the store, so re-running init never re-offers records lazy already holds.

Both offers are prompts — skipped under --non-interactive, never a silent write. Detection and import are best-effort: a hiccup in either prints a (Skipped Claude Code history import: …) note and never fails init. If you decline, you can import later with lazy import-conversation and lazy doctor --import-memory respectively.