Session Capture Research

Research dossier on AI coding-session capture: how SpecStory works internally, what the rest of the market ships, where every agent in jackin❯'s roster stores its conversations, and what it all means for the Déjà Vu design proposal. Every external claim carries a source URL; every local number carries its method. Research conducted: 2026-07-03. Specification: prompt.

Headline numbers

• 1 production cross-agent capture pipeline exists — SpecStory CLI: Apache-2.0, 57,988 LOC Go (~40% tests), 6 providers, no PTY, pure fsnotify-on-native-stores; v2.0.0 (2026-06-29) added cross-agent resume + FTS search. (02)
• ~40 tools cataloged across exporters, viewers, analytics, platforms; 0 ship the cross-agent, host-side, purge-surviving archive Déjà Vu targets. (11, 12)
• 2/6 to 3/6 — best off-the-shelf coverage of jackin❯'s six-agent roster (SpecStory: claude+codex; claude-replay: +opencode); 0 tools cover Kimi or Grok. (20)
• 6/6 of jackin❯'s agents are capturable: five persist watchable local transcripts (Claude/Codex/Kimi/Grok append-only JSONL, OpenCode SQLite+SSE); Amp needs live --stream-json — and turns out to also keep an undocumented local threads/T-*.json materialization. (10)
• 30 days — Claude Code's default transcript auto-delete; jackin❯'s own eject/prune deletes restored histories today. Capture is a race against retention on both sides. (10, 30)
• ±5 s / per-turn git snapshots — two independent implementations (SpecStory provenance engine, Mantra) of turn↔code attribution: the competitive layer above capture. (12)

How to read

• Start: 00 — Executive summary — the landscape and what changes for Déjà Vu.
• SpecStory: 01 — Product, business, reception · 02 — CLI internals (the mechanism chapter — SPI, per-provider extraction, schema, index, resume, cloud, provenance, Lore).
• Landscape: 10 — Agent session stores (per-agent paths/formats/stability for jackin❯'s roster) · 11 — OSS exporters · 12 — Platforms and observability.
• Synthesis: 20 — Comparison matrix and tiers · 30 — jackin❯ fit and the Déjà Vu delta.

Tool tier list

Tier = usefulness to a jackin❯ session-capture effort (roster coverage × mechanism robustness × output quality × maintenance × license). Full rationale in 20.