mindbook

Auto-generate narrative work journal entries from Claude Code sessions.

Every time you work with Claude Code, mindbook quietly watches your sessions and distills the work into human-readable prose — what you were trying to do, what decisions you made, what obstacles you hit.

Install

npm install -g mindbook
mindbook setup
mindbook daemon start

Usage

| Command | Description | |---------|-------------| | mindbook setup | First-time setup (auto-detects Claude Code token) | | mindbook daemon start | Start background watcher (auto-triggers on session inactivity) | | mindbook trigger --cwd <path> | Manually generate a journal entry for a project |

How it works

1. mindbook daemon polls ~/.claude/sessions/ every 30 seconds
2. When a session file hasn't changed for 3 minutes, it reads the session context and calls Claude to generate a narrative paragraph
3. The entry is written to ~/.mindbook/<project-name>.md — one file per project, chronological

Journal format

# my-project

## 2026-06-04 · 2026-06-04-my-project

I was working on building out the architecture for mindbook. The core question 
was how to handle the "3-minute inactivity" trigger reliably...

Token detection

Looks for API token in this order:

1. ~/.claude/settings.json → env.ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN (Claude Code users: zero config)
2. ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable
3. ~/.mindbook/config.json (saved by mindbook setup)

Triggers

• Automatic: 3 minutes after session goes idle (requires daemon)
• Pre-/new: Before starting a new Claude Code session
• Pre-/compact: Before compacting context
• Manual: mindbook trigger --cwd .