Claude Code session manager: find, search and resume your work

You worked on a bug last week, switched projects, and now need the conversation that explains a particular decision. A terminal history can tell you what command you ran. A session transcript can tell you why you ran it.

relai reads Claude Code’s saved sessions alongside other supported coding tools. Use it when you need to browse several projects, inspect the messages before reopening a session, or continue the work in Codex. If you already know the session ID, the native resume command may be all you need.

1. Open Sessions and narrow the list. Choose Filters, then Claude Code. If you use project workspaces, select the relevant project too. Clear unrelated filters if the list looks unexpectedly empty.
2. Search for something you remember. Start with the session title or project. To find a phrase from the conversation, enable the adjacent transcript-search button; the field changes from Search sessions… to Search transcripts…. An error message or distinctive filename is often a better clue than a broad topic.
3. Read before reopening. Select a session, check its working directory and recent messages, then use Find in transcript… for the exact phrase. Confirm this is the conversation with the decision or unfinished task you need.

Searching a transcript and resuming it solve different problems: search recovers the evidence; resume brings the conversation back into the coding tool.

Choose Resume in the transcript toolbar to reopen the existing Claude Code conversation. The menu beside it lets you explicitly choose Open here — built-in terminal or Open in terminal app. The built-in terminal runs your installed CLI inside relai; it does not provide a separate Claude account.

For a new conversation informed by the old work, choose Start fresh with context from the same menu. That builds a handoff primer and starts a new session in the same tool. It is useful when you want a fresh conversation, but its context is selected or summarized rather than an exact restoration of the old conversation.

Before asking the assistant to edit anything, check that the project folder is available and inspect the current files. Resuming a conversation does not roll your repository back to its earlier state. Claude Code must be installed, authenticated and able to access the project.

If you know the session ID and have the project locally, you can resume directly from a terminal in that project:

claude --resume <session-id>

Without an ID, run claude --resume to open Claude Code’s interactive conversation picker. This uses the tool’s native resume capability without adding a session manager. Your existing provider usage and access requirements still apply. relai adds the browse, filter and transcript-inspection workflow around that command.

• Check filters and archives. Clear your search, broaden the source/project selection and include archived sessions.
• Refresh the list. Use the refresh button in Sessions after the coding tool has written new session data.
• Check the source location. Claude Code normally saves sessions under ~/.claude/projects/. A different user account, custom configuration or another machine can mean the files are outside the location relai reads.
• Check the project folder. A visible transcript does not prove its original working directory still exists. Restore or locate the checkout and confirm the files before continuing; a context handoff is not a substitute for missing source code.

For a broader overview of the interface, watch the general relai demo. For switching assistants, follow the Claude Code to Codex handoff guide.