session-detail: A Full Record of What Actually Happened
Every long project hits a moment where someone asks, "wait, why did we decide that?" or "what did we actually fix last week?" If you work with an AI like Claude across many chats, that question gets even harder to answer. Chats end. The details of what got built, what broke, and what fixed it just disappear.
session-detail is a tool built to solve that. You type "session detail," and Claude writes a full, organized record of the current chat: what got built, what got decided and why, what problems came up and how they got solved, and what to do next. It is the bigger, more detailed cousin of a lighter tool called -summary, which is meant for quick handoffs instead of full records.
A Full Log, Not a Quick Note
context-summary is like a boarding pass: light, fast, made to get your next chat moving right away. session-detail is more like a flight log: heavier, more thorough, the kind of record you can come back to months later and still understand exactly what happened and why.
Use the lighter tool when you just want to keep working. Use session-detail when you need a real paper trail, whether that is for and compliance, handing work to someone else, or just your own memory down the road.
What Goes Into the Record
Each record has two parts.
The full record covers what got done, every decision made (and the reasoning behind it, plus what else was considered), every problem that came up (and its root cause and fix), every meaningful that ran, every file that was created, changed, or deleted, and a checklist for what comes next.
The short summary carries forward the important stuff: new facts learned this session, anything that changed from what people believed before, decisions that are locked and should not be revisited, questions still open, and warnings about anything risky for next time.
How It Handles Projects That Take a While
Most projects do not finish in one sitting. session-detail handles that with something called incremental checkpoints. The first time you run it in a chat, it writes a full record. If you run it again later in that same chat, it notices the earlier checkpoint and writes a smaller update covering only the new stuff, instead of repeating everything already written down. Each checkpoint carries a hidden tag that marks which session it belongs to and its place in order, so nothing gets copied twice and nothing gets lost.
What Got Fixed in the Newest Version
A recent check found a real gap in how the tool spotted earlier checkpoints, plus a few smaller issues. Here is what changed, in plain terms.
The detection gap. This tool normally prints its record straight into the chat instead of saving a file. That is fine, until you run it twice in the same chat. The second time, it only checked for saved files, so it never noticed the first record that had already been printed earlier in that same chat. That meant it wrote a whole new full record from scratch instead of a smaller update, wasting effort. The fix makes the tool check both saved files and the chat itself for an earlier record.
Saving real files where possible. Before this fix, the tool always printed its output straight into the chat, even in places where saving an actual file was possible. A record that size, printed into chat, gets reread on every future reply in that chat, which adds up fast. Now, wherever downloading a file is possible, the tool saves the record as a real file, and only prints to chat if there is no other choice.
A cleaner way to name files. The old system tried to count sessions, like "this is the first one today, this is the second." That meant scanning folders every time, and it broke around midnight if a session ran past the day change. The new version uses a short piece of the chat's own internal ID instead. No counting, no folder scanning, no midnight problem.
A boundary that actually works. A smaller update is supposed to cover only what happened after the last checkpoint. The old rule used the checkpoint's timestamp to mark that line. But an AI cannot actually see timestamps on individual messages, so that rule never really worked. The new version uses the checkpoint's spot in the chat instead, which the tool can actually check.
One repeated section got removed. The record used to have two sections that said almost the same thing, repeating details already covered elsewhere. That extra section is gone now.
Getting It
session-detail is free and open for anyone to use. Find it at thebpandey/session-detail on GitHub. It works as a Claude tool for chat use, or as a Claude Code command for teams who want the record saved straight into a project's files.
Next Actions
- Get the tool if you have not already, and try it at the end of your next work session.
- Run it twice in one long chat to see the smaller update happen in real time.
- If you use both , use context-summary to keep moving fast, and session-detail when you need the full record.
