openclaw-rewind

Git-like time-travel for AI conversations. Save snapshots of your OpenClaw sessions, rewind mistakes, branch experiments, and diff turns — all from the command line.

$ openclaw-rewind save --label "before refactor"
Saved snapshot e4feda90 (before refactor)
  turns : 42
  hash  : 0decacb38312

$ openclaw-rewind back 1
Rewound to snapshot e4feda90 (1 step back).

Why

LLM sessions are append-only JSONL files. When a conversation goes sideways — wrong tool call, hallucinated path, bad refactor plan — you usually have to start over or hand-edit the file. openclaw-rewind treats your session like a git-tracked document: save, list, rewind, branch, diff.

No OpenClaw runtime required. Reads and writes ~/.openclaw/agents/*/sessions/*.jsonl directly.

Install

npm install -g @syeda_quratualin/openclaw-rewind

Or run without installing:

npx @syeda_quratualin/openclaw-rewind list

Commands

| Command | Does | |---|---| | sessions | List all detected sessions across agents | | save [--label <text>] | Snapshot the current session state | | list | Show snapshots for a session (oldest → newest) | | back <N> | Restore the snapshot N steps before the newest | | to <id> | Restore a specific snapshot by id or label | | branch <name> <id> | Create a sibling session file forked from a snapshot | | diff <a> <b> | Compare two snapshots (turns added/removed, hash change) |

All commands accept --session <id> to target a specific session. By default the most recently modified session is chosen.

Safety

Every back and to operation auto-saves the current state as auto-before-restore-<id> before overwriting. You can always undo a rewind.

Environment

• OPENCLAW_HOME — override the default ~/.openclaw root.
• --root <path> — same, per-invocation.

Example workflow

# Mark a known-good point before a risky prompt
openclaw-rewind save --label "clean-baseline"

# ... let the agent run, it goes off the rails ...

# Rewind
openclaw-rewind back 1

# Or fork a branch to try a different direction without losing the current one
openclaw-rewind branch experiment clean-baseline

How it works

Snapshots live alongside the session:

~/.openclaw/agents/<agent>/sessions/
  abc123.jsonl              ← the live session
  abc123.rewind/
    e4feda90.jsonl          ← snapshot data (full copy)
    e4feda90.json           ← metadata (label, hash, turn count, timestamp)

Copies are cheap — sessions are small JSONL. No database, no daemon.

License

MIT © Quratulain Shah