Recover context after closing or losing a session

Updated August 10, 2026

Goal: you closed the shard, restarted crystl, or came back after a compaction, and you need what happened back.

What you need

  • Nothing set up. Transcripts are read from Claude Code’s own files, and crystl’s timeline index builds itself.
  • Reading history is free. crystl resurrect list is free too; the resurrect action itself is a Guild control command.

Steps

  1. Undo the close first, if it was recent. crystl keeps a short undo-close list per gem for local shards:

    crystl resurrect list --gem myapp          # what can come back
crystl resurrect --gem myapp               # the most recently closed one
crystl resurrect --gem myapp --shard opal  # a specific one

    The shard returns with its name, color, isolation, and agent session, resumed best effort. Quest party members and remote shards aren’t tracked.

  2. Read the session when you want the record rather than the shard. Open the gem menu (⋮ on the gem’s tab) and choose history. The rail lists past sessions by date, the right pane has Conversation and Tools tabs, and clicking a moment jumps the pane to that point.

  3. Search across everything with Cmd+Shift+F. The timeline covers every shard’s agent turns and every shell command, across all gems, sessions, worktrees, quests, and SSH shards, open and closed.

  4. Pull it from the terminal when you’re an agent recovering your own context:

    crystl history                     # navigation index for the active shard
crystl history --row 47            # fetch one row in full
crystl history --index --tool Bash # narrow the index
crystl history search "migration"  # across every shard, past and present

    Bare crystl history prints one line per row with a preview, so you skim first and fetch only what you need. --all dumps the whole transcript.

What you’ll see when it works

A resurrected shard comes back as a shell first, then relaunches its own agent the moment something is dispatched to it: a message from the chat dock, a quest turn, the phone, or crystl send. That’s what lets an overnight fan-out survive quitting crystl. crystl shards is explicit about the two failure states, ⏸ no agent — relaunches on dispatch versus ⚠ no agent — relaunch failed, so a dispatch is never quietly dropped into a bare shell.

For history, the session summary prints on top: total tokens, tool calls, models, and wall-clock active time. Search results are tagged by kind and open the session at the exact moment.

Two limits worth knowing. The navigator is Claude Code only for now, because Codex and Antigravity CLI record history in different formats, and crystl history returns nothing on those shards. The timeline is agent-neutral and does cover them, so Cmd+Shift+F still finds that work. Restore on restart is Claude Code only too, while resurrect reopens Codex and Antigravity conversations as well.

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