The session died. Two hours of decisions died with it.

A session is designed to be independent

This is not a bug report, it is the documentation. Anthropic's own page on how Claude Code works says it plainly:

"Sessions are independent. Each new session starts with a fresh context window, without the conversation history from previous sessions."

code.claude.com, How Claude Code works

Read that as a design decision rather than a failure and the rest follows. A fresh window is a fresh window. Anything you needed to carry across had to be somewhere else.

Rewind saves you inside a session, not after one

Worth being fair about what checkpoints do, because they are good. While a session is alive, rewind can put back the code, or the conversation, or both. That covers the everyday accident where a change went the wrong way.

It is a different tool from the one people reach for after a crash. The documentation says what it was built for:

"Checkpoints are designed for quick, session-level recovery."

code.claude.com, checkpointing

Session level. When the session itself is what you lost, you are back on resume, and resume is exactly where the two reports above land. There is also a clock on it: checkpoints are deleted along with sessions after 30 days.

The state was living in the wrong place

Under all of it is one habit. The plan, the decisions, the next step and the thing you were worried about were all held in the conversation, because that is where the work was happening. A conversation is a working surface. It was never storage.

Three things need a home outside the chat window. You can do all of them by hand, in a text file, today.

1. The next step, written before you stop

One sentence, specific enough to act on. Not "continue the payments work". Something like "the webhook handler is written, the retry path is not, the test file is empty". Write it while you still know it, because in the morning you will not.

2. The decisions, separated from the chatter

Most of a session is noise. A few lines are not: the thing you chose, and why you did not choose the other one. Those few lines are what takes twenty minutes to reconstruct and two minutes to record.

3. The warnings

What is half done, what is failing, what will bite whoever opens this next. This is the part people skip, and it is the part that turns a lost session into a lost day.

Do that by hand and you have solved most of the problem. The reason people do not is that it depends on remembering to do it at the exact moment the session is about to die, which is the one moment nobody is thinking about record keeping.

Mission HQ is those three notes, kept on a server instead of in the conversation, and written without anyone remembering to write them.

The record is written as you go

A checkpoint is posted on every prompt and at the end of every turn. Nothing waits for a tidy goodbye at the end of a session, because sessions rarely end tidily.

The next session opens with one next action

Starting a session returns the current state, the single next action, and the warnings that matter: failing tests, tasks that have gone stale, decisions still waiting on you. One action, not four competing suggestions.

The last agent leaves its own account

Every session closes with a summary, the current state, the next steps and the warnings, in the words of the agent that was actually there. The next one reads that instead of guessing from the code.

It lives outside every context window

The record sits on a server, so compaction, a crash, a closed terminal and a switch to a different editor all leave it untouched. Your source code stays on your machine.

Worth being precise, because this is the part that decides whether the next morning is calm. The record holds what was written while the work was happening: the checkpoints posted during the session, the summary and warnings left at the end, the tasks that moved, and the decisions someone chose to save.

When you open the project again, you are reading that. Not a reconstruction, and not an attempt to remember a conversation. A document, with dates on it, that was being written the whole time.

The opening view hands you the last four sessions in full. Everything before that is still there and still searchable, it just does not arrive uninvited.