# Conversation history

Patterm imports the conversations your agent CLIs already keep, so you can browse, search and resume past work from one place.

History is read from the CLIs' own files on the machine that hosts Patterm. Patterm reads those files and never changes them.

## Import conversations

Patterm imports from three sources:

| Harness     | Default location                      |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------- |
| Claude Code | `~/.claude/projects`                  |
| Codex       | `~/.codex/sessions`                   |
| OpenCode    | `~/.local/share/opencode/opencode.db` |

Open **Settings › Conversation history** to manage them.

- **Sources** lists each source with a switch. Enabled sources import automatically. A source whose path does not exist is marked **Missing**.
- **Add source** adds another file or directory for a harness.
- **Import now** imports new conversations from every enabled source straight away. **Recent import results** shows what happened.
- **Import notifications** controls whether Patterm notifies you when imports start, finish or fail.
- **Reset and re-import…** clears Patterm's imported copy and imports the enabled sources again. The CLIs' own history files are not touched.

Progress also appears in the **History import queue** button on the History page, which shows running and waiting imports and any files that failed.

Patterm links each conversation to a project by matching the session, then the worktree, then the working directory the conversation ran in. A project's history page lists the conversations linked to that project.

## Browse history

Open a project's **Conversation history** page from the project navigation or the command palette.

- The list on the left shows the project's conversations, newest first, with a chip for each harness and its count. Select a chip to filter by harness.
- Select a conversation to read its transcript on the right. Older messages load as you scroll up.
- **Show reasoning** and **Hide reasoning** toggle the agent's reasoning messages, when the conversation has any.

![The Conversation history page. Past conversations are listed at the left with a chip for each harness, and the selected transcript is shown at the right.](https://patterm.com/images/docs/conversation-history.webp)

## Search

Press `Ctrl+K` to open the command palette and choose **Search workspace content…**. The search looks across agents, conversations and history, and selecting a message result opens that message in the conversation.

When you resume a conversation (below), the picker has its own search box. It matches titles, paths and message text across the whole history.

Agents can search the project's history too, using `search_conversation_history` and `history_get`. Results are limited to the caller's project.

## Resume a conversation

You can start a new agent that continues an old conversation in its original project context. Any of these work:

- On the History page, select **Resume**. The button is disabled if the conversation has no native ID or belongs to another project.
- In the command palette, choose **Resume conversation…** and pick one from the list.
- In an [Integrated](https://patterm.com/docs/agents-and-processes.md#integrated-and-tui-agents) conversation, type `/resume`, optionally followed by a search term. When the current conversation is still empty, the resumed one replaces it.

Resume opens a new agent of the same harness, continuing that native conversation.

An agent can resume a conversation too: pass a `conversation_id` from `search_conversation_history` to `spawn_agent`. Patterm rejects the request if that conversation already has a live managed agent.

## Automatic summaries

Automatic summaries are short recaps that appear in an agent's session context, in the sidebar status line and in hover cards. They are off by default.

> [!WARNING]
> Turning summaries on sends conversation text to the provider you select and uses its usage allowance. Redaction removes obvious secrets but is best-effort, so some can get through. Read this section before you enable it.

### What gets summarised

For agents, Patterm sends the conversation's prose in order, in batches, together with the previous recap so each one updates the last. Tool calls and reasoning are left out. Shell processes are summarised from their recent terminal output instead.

Only top-level agents that you have messaged are summarised. Child agents are skipped. After you enable summaries, a summary appears once you message an agent. A large existing conversation starts with partial coverage, shown in the session context.

Each request runs the CLI you choose, with no tools and no MCP access, using that CLI's normal sign-in. Patterm does not fall back to another model or to an API key.

### Turn them on

1. Open **Settings › Auto-summaries**.
2. Under **Summariser**, choose a **Provider**: **Claude Code**, **Codex** or **OpenCode**. A provider is selectable when its CLI is found on the machine.
3. Choose a **Model** and, where offered, **Reasoning**. The Claude Code default is `haiku`.
4. Set **Minimum interval**: 15 seconds, 30 seconds or 1 minute. This is the shortest gap between two summaries of one agent.
5. Select **Test summariser**. This makes one request with synthetic text, so it uses a little of your allowance but reads no conversation.
6. Switch on **Enable auto-summaries**.

**Generate titles** is on by default. It names agents that you have not named, from the same request. A name you or an agent chose always wins.

The panel shows **Last background error** if a recent summary failed.

### Check coverage and rebuild

In an agent's session context, **Review summary coverage** shows how many messages have been processed and roughly how many calls a full rebuild would take. From there you can:

- **Rebuild from beginning** to regenerate the recap from the whole conversation.
- **Pause rebuild** and **Resume catch-up** while it runs in batches. Your current recap stays visible meanwhile.

If earlier conversation text changes, Patterm asks you to rebuild rather than quietly rewriting the recap.

Summaries never change an agent's activity state or any timer.

## Related

- [Supported harnesses](https://patterm.com/docs/harnesses.md)
- [Settings](https://patterm.com/docs/settings.md)
- [Data and privacy](https://patterm.com/docs/data-and-privacy.md)

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This is one page of the Patterm documentation. The index of every page is at https://patterm.com/llms.txt.