Session recap

kapacitor recap is the fastest way to find out what a session did when you already know which session you want. By default it prints an AI-generated summary — why the work was done, key decisions, and anything left unfinished. Use --full for the complete transcript with every prompt, response, and tool call.

Don’t know the session ID?

For “didn’t we work on something like this last month?” questions, use Session recall instead — the agent-facing search side of the same data.

Recap skill

Most of the time you’re already talking to a coding agent — and the Kapacitor plugin gives that agent a skill it can invoke without you switching to a terminal. On Claude Code it’s /kapacitor:recap, installed automatically by kapacitor setup. On Codex the same kapacitor setup flow installs kapacitor-recap to ~/.agents/skills/. On Cursor (or any other agent that reads ~/.agents/skills/ without Codex on PATH), run kapacitor plugin install --skills once to get kapacitor-recap set up. Both invocations shell out to kapacitor recap under the hood and inline the output into the chat.

You almost never need to type the slash command yourself — the skill is description-matched, so a natural question is enough. The three phrasings that map cleanly to what the skill can do:

Recent activity in the current repo. The skill runs kapacitor recap --repo and lists the most recent ended sessions with their summaries. Start here when you don’t know the session ID.

What have we been working on in this repo recently?

Catch me up on the last few sessions here, then suggest where to pick up.

A specific past session by slug or ID. The dashboard URL gives you both forms — a 32-character session ID (c4de7fbecff54e2cbf809858d02f58be) or a slug (acme-billing-rate-limit). Either works.

Recap session acme-billing-rate-limit and propose next steps.

Walk me through session c4de7fbecff54e2cbf809858d02f58be — what changed and why?

The current session. The Kapacitor SessionStart hook exports KAPACITOR_SESSION_ID, so kapacitor recap with no argument resolves to this session. Mostly useful for “summarise what we just did before we continue” mid-conversation.

Summarise what we've done in this session so far, then we'll continue.

For continuation chains (a session context-compacted and continued in a new one), the skill threads --chain through. The phrasing the agent picks up on is something like “…across the whole chain” or “…across the continuations” — explicit enough that it knows to follow the link rather than recap just one segment.

The recap renders into the chat as a single message, then your conversation continues with that context loaded. That’s what makes “pick up where this left off” a one-line ask rather than a copy-paste exercise — the agent reads the recap, internalises decisions and unfinished items, and proceeds.

Use in the terminal

When you’d rather just print the recap to stdout — for scripting, code review, or because you don’t have an agent open — call the CLI directly:

kapacitor recap <sessionId>                    # summary (default)
kapacitor recap --full <sessionId>             # complete transcript
kapacitor recap --chain <sessionId>            # summary across the continuation chain
kapacitor recap --chain --full <sessionId>     # full transcript across the chain

The identifier can be:

• A 32-character session ID — open the session in the dashboard and click the copy icon next to the session title (it flips to a green check on success); also available from hook payloads.
• A meta-session slug — the slug-shaped URL in the dashboard, e.g. acme-billing-rate-limit.

When you run kapacitor recap from inside a Claude Code or Codex session that has Kapacitor hooks installed, the session ID is picked up automatically from the environment — you don’t need to pass an argument.

Continuation chains

When a session hits context-window limits, Claude may compact it and continue in a new session. The two sessions are linked. --chain tells recap to follow the link forwards or backwards and summarise the entire arc, not just one segment.

When summaries are generated

Summaries are written when a session ends. If a session is still running, kapacitor recap returns whatever it can synthesize from the events seen so far — typically less useful than waiting for the session to end.

For an ended session, the summary is cached server-side, so repeated kapacitor recap <id> calls don’t re-run the LLM.

Related

• Errors & plan validation — kapacitor errors and kapacitor validate-plan, two adjacent post-session tools.
• Evaluations — for a structured quality score, not just a narrative summary.
• Session recall — the same summaries (and full transcripts) exposed to your coding agent so it can pull prior work into the current conversation.