Chronicle — AI Session Time Machine

Local-first session manager for AI coding assistants. Import your conversation logs, click any message to time-travel to the exact code state at that moment (reconstructed from your project's Git history), and see where your tokens and time actually go. Everything runs on your machine: no LLM calls, no cloud, no telemetry. The one network call is opt-out — Chronicle can read your own Claude plan quota from Anthropic (the same request Claude Code makes; Codex quota is read locally), and one Settings toggle turns it off. Source logs and project repos are never written to.

Full docs: getchronicle.dev/docs.

Install

Requires Node.js 24+ (nodejs.org).

npx chronicle-cli

That starts the local app and opens the dashboard in your browser. Flags: --port <n> to pick a port (default 41730, auto-advances if busy), --no-open to skip launching the browser. Data lives at ~/.chronicle/chronicle.db (override with CHRONICLE_DATA_DIR).

Then click Import Sessions, pick a source tool, and open a session.

What it does

Full details for every feature live at getchronicle.dev/docs. The highlights:

• Import from 4 tools — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode, via a guided wizard. Read-only into a local SQLite DB (WAL-safe temp copies; originals never touched). Sessions aggregate into logical projects by repo path.
• Home dashboard — the landing page is a live Insights-overview: a Today/7d/30d KPI strip, a Today-only Activity block (live sessions + what happened "since you left"), a Burn tile, and a recent-sessions ledger with search, day-grouping, and bulk select below it. The project grid moved to its own Projects page.
• Time-travel & Playback — click any message to see your code exactly as it was, rebuilt from Git history, with file diffs, a scrubbable timeline of messages and commits, and a resizable conversation panel.
• Insights — a tabbed analytics home (Overview / Explore / Content) plus per-project tabs (Overview / Explore / Content / Sessions): cost, token magnitude, tool-call and content breakdowns, calibrated to true share. Explore adds an hourly time brush (with an "Other" rollup for long tails) and a per-session grouping view; Content surfaces 7 usage characteristics (long sessions, workflow runs, subagent turns, high-context sessions, cache efficiency, and more) as scannable callouts.
• Subagents — sidechain (subagent) turns are first-class, including subagents Claude Code writes to separate transcript files/folders: attributed with token usage, surfaced in an Overview card with the real run count and a per-subagent drill-in, so subagent cost is no longer invisible.
• Security redaction — built-in and custom redaction rules with a detected-vs-redacted preview and a one-way redacted export.
• Invisible sync — background incremental import that keeps sessions fresh (tombstones for deletes, a noise gate, and pause controls) with no manual re-import. A topbar indicator shows "synced Xm ago" (or "syncing…" / "sync failed") and doubles as a click-to-sync-now button from anywhere in the app.
• Refine — distill a session into docs or a reusable prompt (Keep / Delete / Edit / Insert, token stats, Markdown export).
• Search — a Home command palette backed by an FTS5 full-text index (LIKE fallback) across all sessions; empty query shows recent access.
• Cost & usage — per-model token totals multiplied by a local, static price table (no billed data ever leaves your machine), split by cache-write TTL.
• i18n — English · 简体中文 · 日本語.

Develop

npm install
npm run dev        # Vite dev server + API in one process → http://localhost:4173
npm run typecheck  # tsc -b (type gate; TS never emits — Node runs .ts natively)
npm test           # node --test over test/**/*.test.mjs
npm run build      # vite build → dist/

The server executes TypeScript directly (Node 24 strips types at load); there is no build step for dev. See CLAUDE.md and getchronicle.dev/docs for architecture.

Family

Chronicle is one of three local-first tools that work on their own and know about each other:

• Chronicle answers what happened in a session, in depth.
• nisse is the repo your assistant lives in: taxonomy, governance, records.
• Varde is an operator console over your whole AI stack: spend, permissions, and what needs your eyes today. It detects Chronicle and links out to it for session depth rather than reimplementing it.

License

Apache-2.0. Third-party notices: NOTICE.