How to Find an Old ZCode Session

Finding an old ZCode session is easy when you remember which task it was and hard when you only remember what was said. ZCode keeps every session on your machine under ~/.zcode, so nothing is lost to an account limit or a server-side cleanup — but the history lives in SQLite databases, so digging it up takes the right method for what you remember. Work down this list.

If it was recent: ZCode's history view

Start where you already are. ZCode lists your past sessions and tasks, most recent first, and you can reopen one directly.

This works when the session was this morning, or when the task name in the list jogs your memory. It stops working as the list grows: three weeks of sessions across several projects, and you are scrolling on vibes. That is when you need a better signal than recency.

If you remember when: sort the history by date

You can pin down when a session happened from the files themselves:

ls -lt ~/.zcode/cli/db/

Sorting by modification time shows when ZCode last wrote to each database — a rough but real signal of when sessions happened. (For Claude Code the equivalent is ls -lt ~/.claude/projects/*/, where each session is its own dated file; ZCode's databases make the signal coarser.)

Two caveats: the timestamps move whenever ZCode writes, not only when you chat, and a date tells you when, not what — you still have to open things to check.

If you remember what was said: search the content

This is the case that actually hurts. You remember discussing the retry logic, or the name of a function, or a decision about caching — and no session list answers that. The phrase is on your disk, inside the session databases, but ordinary text tools cannot see inside SQLite:

rg -i "retry backoff" ~/.zcode   # finds nothing useful

Your options:

1. Query the databases yourself — open a copy with sqlite3 or DB Browser for SQLite and search the message tables. Doable for one session you care about a lot; miserable as a habit, and the internal schema is not a stable interface.
2. Index the history once — LLMnesia reads your ZCode sessions and indexes your prompts and the assistant's replies (never subagent runs, commands, or tool output), so "retry backoff" returns the conversation, the project, the date, and a snippet — searched the same way as your Claude Code, Codex, and web AI history.

Once you have found it: get the context back in

Finding the session is half the job; the other half is using it. Two ways:

• Copy what matters. Open the session, pull the relevant exchange into your new prompt. Fine occasionally.
• Let ZCode fetch it. With LLMnesia's free MCP connection, you can ask ZCode directly — "what did we decide about caching last week?" — and it searches your indexed history locally, answers with the context, and links the sources. No copy-paste archaeology; the agent you are working with becomes the front end to everything you already worked out.

If it is really gone

ZCode does not run your history through a server-side retention clock, so sessions do not silently vanish the way they can on web platforms. When history is missing, the usual suspects are: a different machine (the history is per-device), a cleaned-up ~/.zcode, or a disk issue. If the folder is intact, the sessions are there — back the folder up or use an encrypted sync like Vault so a lost machine does not mean lost history.