Session Librarian

Manage the user's session library conversationally: find past sessions about a topic, summarize what they decided, rename them meaningfully, split work into parallel sessions, and propose stale ones for archive or deletion — all from a plain-language request like "find my sessions about Q3 pricing, keep the useful ones, and clean up the duplicates."

Inspired by Perplexity Computer's prompt-driven session management (Aug 2026): the agent starts, organizes, and cleans up the user's own session library, and always shows the plan before touching anything.

When to Use

• "What sessions do I have about X?" / "What did we decide about X?"
• "Rename these sessions to something meaningful."
• "Clean up my session library" / "archive the stale ones."
• "Fork that session into a follow-up focused on Y."
• "Split this into one session per ticket" (see Parallel workstreams below).

The Two Surfaces

| Task | Surface | |---|---| | Find sessions by topic, read content, summarize decisions | session_search tool (FTS5 over the message store) | | List/filter by metadata (age, source, cost, tokens, workspace) | hermes sessions list / stats via terminal | | Rename | hermes sessions rename <session_id> <title...> | | Bulk soft-hide (reversible) | hermes sessions archive <filters> | | Delete (destructive) | hermes sessions delete / hermes sessions prune <filters> | | Export before deleting anything valuable | hermes sessions export --session-id <id> --format md | | Continue work in a new place | /branch (fork current session) or start a fresh session and cite the summary |

Procedure

① Discover. Use session_search(query=..., limit=5-10) with topic keywords; vary phrasing (feature name, symptom, project name). For metadata sweeps ("sessions older than 60 days from telegram"), use hermes sessions list --source telegram --limit 50 instead.

② Summarize per session. The discovery result's bookend_start (goal), match window, and bookend_end (resolution) usually suffice — only dump a full session (session_search(session_id=...)) when the user asks for decisions in depth. Report each as: link (@session: form) — one-line goal — one-line outcome.

③ Plan before acting (MANDATORY for anything that mutates). Present a plan table first: which sessions get renamed to what, which get archived, which are proposed for deletion and why (duplicate of which keeper, stale, empty). Wait for the user's go-ahead. Exception: a single rename the user explicitly dictated can be done directly.

④ Act with the safest primitive.

• Prefer archive (reversible soft-hide) over delete/prune.
• Always run destructive commands with --dry-run first and show the output,

then re-run with --yes after confirmation.

• Before deleting anything with meaningful content, offer

hermes sessions export --format md as a backup.

⑤ Report. Renames applied, sessions archived (count + how to undo: archived sessions remain in the DB and are listed with --include-archived), anything exported, anything skipped and why.

Parallel Workstreams

For "one session per ticket, investigate each, report back": do NOT try to drive other live sessions. Use delegate_task with one task per workstream — each subagent runs in its own session automatically — then synthesize their summaries. Mention that each delegation's transcript is itself searchable later via session_search.

Pitfalls

• Never delete without a dry-run + explicit confirmation in this

conversation. A standing "clean things up" is authority to propose, not to prune.

• session_search finds content, not metadata. Age/cost/source filters

live in the CLI; combine both when the request mixes them ("old sessions about pricing").

• Titles are identity for /resume <title>. When renaming, keep titles

short, unique, and prefix-friendly; warn the user if a rename collides with an existing title.

• Archived ≠ deleted. Archive hides sessions from default listings only.

Say which one you did.

• Cross-profile session links (@session:<profile>/<id>) are read-only

from another profile; management commands act on the current profile's DB.

Verification

After a cleanup pass, re-run the discovery query and hermes sessions list to confirm the library reflects the plan (keepers present with new titles, archived ones gone from the default listing).