Session Search

Answers "which of my past sessions was about X" and then pulls that session's context in.

Step 1: Check the graph exists and is fresh

bash
obsidian-wiki sessions-query "<topic>" --json

If this exits 1 with "run sessions-build first", tell the user and offer /session-brain. If graph.json is more than ~7 days old, mention it and offer a rebuild — but do not silently rebuild, since that is a multi-second operation the user did not ask for.

Step 2: Rank

The scoring already combines four signals, so take the ordering as given rather than re-ranking:

• similarity — TF-IDF cosine against the session's text
• cluster lift — a session inside the best-matching topic scores higher even if its own words

never matched. This is why a session that never said "telemetry" can still surface for it.

• bookmark boost — a human already flagged this session as worth keeping
• time decay — 90-day half-life, applied with a floor so an old exact match still outranks a

fresh weak one

Useful filters: --project NAME, --cluster N, --since DATE, --top N.

Step 3: Present

Show the top ~5 as a compact table — title, project, date, topic, and the why string, which already explains the match. Do not dump the raw JSON at the user.

Two things must be stated honestly rather than glossed over:

• Entries with loadable: false are history-only: the transcript has been pruned from disk

and only the prompts survive. They are listed in unloadable with a reason. Say the transcript is gone; do not imply it can be retrieved.

• If everything relevant is unloadable, answer from the prompt text that is there and say that

is all that remains.

Step 4: Load — hand off, do not reimplement

should_load holds at most 3 session ids worth opening, already filtered to ones with transcripts.

Prefer an existing loader skill if the user has one installed:

• claude-session-load — loads a Claude session by id
• bookmark-load — use when the hit is bookmarked

⚠️ Those skills live in the user's personal skills directory (~/.claude/skills/), not in this repo. They may not exist. Do not assume them and do not error if they are absent — fall back to reading the transcript directly:

bash
# the path is in the query result as `transcript`
obsidian-wiki sessions-show <session-id> --pretty

The transcript is JSONL and can be tens of MB. Never read one whole. Filter to the human turns first:

bash
grep -c '' <transcript>   # size check before anything else
python3 -c "
import json,sys
for line in open(sys.argv[1], errors='replace'):
    try: r = json.loads(line)
    except ValueError: continue
    if r.get('type')=='user' and not r.get('isSidechain') and not r.get('isMeta'):
        c = (r.get('message') or {}).get('content')
        if isinstance(c,str) and not c.lstrip().startswith('<'): print('>', c[:400])
" <transcript>

Step 5: Answer

Synthesise from what you loaded and cite the session ids you used. If the answer came from a history-only session's prompts rather than a real transcript, say so — the user needs to know how much of the context you actually have.

Related

• /session-brain — build or refresh the graph, survey and name topics
• wiki-query — search compiled vault knowledge; this skill searches raw session history instead
• wiki-agent — pull a topic out of another agent's history and distil it into the vault