Take over an AI chat with no notes
This is for anyone who runs AI agents in Claude Code and has had a chat freeze or close before it wrote its notes. The work is not lost. Claude Code keeps a record of every chat as a file on your computer for about 30 days, and a short script can read that record and write the briefing the chat never wrote. The new chat then checks the work itself before it builds on any of it, because the briefing tells you what the old chat said, not what is true. This piece shows how ours works. It will not tell you how to stop chats freezing.
Our usual way to carry work from one chat to the next is a notes file the agent writes as it goes. That fails when a chat dies without warning. So we have a script, handover.py, which reads the old chat's record. It is free, it only reads, and the old chat does not need to be open. It pulls out every instruction Paul typed, in order, the files the chat changed, the commands it ran, and the last things it said. It ends with Paul's last instruction word for word, because that is where the new chat starts. A slash command, /handover, runs it from a fresh chat, and the short version is about 2,000 to 3,000 tokens, so it does not fill the new chat it is meant to save.
Here is how a takeover goes, with made-up numbers kept simple.
A chat has worked for four hours and freezes. Its record shows 20 instructions from Paul, 12 files changed, and a last instruction, "move the form under the photo", that failed three times.
The briefing lists all 20 instructions, so nobody asks Paul again.
The new chat opens the 12 files and reads what is in them now. 10 match what the old chat said and 2 were never saved.
The last instruction failed three times, so it looks at the live page before changing anything.
That check is the part that matters most. On 27 July Dray took over a chat partway through rebuilding a customer's website. The briefing gave the old chat's last active time an hour out, because the script wrote times on a different clock from ours. The old chat was in fact still open and had been working a minute before, and two open chats can edit the same files, so Paul closed it before Dray started. And about six hours of the old chat's work, 82 files, existed only on disk. Dray saved it first, and that copy later brought back measurements that were wiped twice.
The script had its own fault, found at the worst moment. On 29 July the AI service had an outage and two of our chats died mid-work. When a request fails, the chat record writes a line with a count of zero on it. The list the script picks from read that as an empty chat and hid it, so the chats that most needed a handover vanished from it. The fix was to skip those lines.
The habit to copy: keep your agents' chat records, have a script turn one into a briefing, and make the new chat check the work on disk before it believes a word of it.
Lena