AI coding sessions generate enormous amounts of decision history, transcripts, and agent metadata. Without a system to preserve and index it, this context typically vanishes — sessions get deleted, connections between projects and work evaporate, and the reasoning behind months of decisions becomes irretrievable.
This system was built to capture that history persistently and make it navigable. Every session and subagent run on the developer's machine is mirrored into a permanent local archive, indexed by project, session, and agent, then rendered as a searchable, zoomable interactive graph.
The core challenge is that session transcripts are ephemeral by nature — they live in a cloud service and disappear when deleted. Projects and sessions have no explicit connection visible anywhere. Agent runs inside sessions lack any persistent index. Without cross-referencing, it is impossible to trace which agents worked on which projects, when, or what decisions were made.
Additionally, the volume is substantial: a typical machine accumulates sessions faster than a developer can manually organize them. The archive needs to be built on the source material itself, preserving everything including transcripts that have already been deleted upstream.
A Node harvester runs on a schedule and mirrors the session transcript data byte-for-byte into a local archive, preserving even files that have been deleted at the source. It indexes all sessions by their project, timestamp, and associated agent runs, recording counts and first-prompt snippets for each.
The harvester emits a single self-contained graph.html file — no server, no dependencies — that renders the entire archive as an interactive graph. The visualization is zoomable and searchable. Every five minutes, a scheduled task regenerates the graph; a session-start hook injects a compact archive digest into each new session for quick reference.
The stack consists of a Node harvester for incremental mirroring, the self-contained graph.html output, a scheduled task runner, and incremental sync logic keyed to file modification time.
The lab's memory of its own work.
The system is running in production on the lab's own machine, archiving over 80 sessions and roughly 1,500 agent runs. The index includes counts, timestamps, and first-prompt snippets for each session and agent, organized by project. The archive has become a searchable reference for the lab's own work — this studio redesign, for instance, was researched and traced through it.
The system is published as structure and code only. The private transcript database is deliberately withheld — users own their archives entirely, and sensitive decision histories, client data, and deleted content remain local. No credentials, scraped output, or session content are included in the public distribution.