lrhodin/recall

Recall

Query past sessions and temporal summaries. Recall revives past context and answers questions from first-person experience.

Before you recall

Check your context first. Your system prompt already contains temporal caches — today, this week, this month, this quarter, this year. Read them before calling any tool. The answer, or at least the right starting point, is often already in your context. Grep and recall are expensive; attention is free.

When recall IS needed, use your temporal context to pick the right entry point. Don't guess dates — your caches tell you which week or month a thread lived in.

When to use recall

If it happened in a past session and isn't saved as a file, recall is how you find it. Start at the temporal level that covers the time range and drill down.

Invocation

recall is on PATH (~/.local/bin/recall). Always use it directly — never run the source file.

recall <ref> "question"
recall 2026-03-05 "What shipped today?"
recall 2026-W10 "What was the main thread?"
recall 2026-03 "What's the trajectory of this month?"
recall 2026-Q1 "What emerged this quarter?"
recall 2026 "What's the arc of this year?"
recall 50690a64 "What beeper commands did you run?"

Reference types

| Format | Level | Context loaded | |--------|-------|---------------| | YYYY-MM-DD | Day | All episodes for that day | | YYYY-Www | Week | Cached day summaries | | YYYY-MM | Month | Cached week summaries | | YYYY-QN | Quarter | Cached month summaries | | YYYY | Year | Cached quarter summaries | | UUID prefix | Session | Full session transcript |

Navigation pattern

Always drill down through layers. Each level only knows about its direct subordinates — a year knows quarters, a quarter knows months, a month knows weeks, a week knows days, a day knows sessions.

At each level, ask a locating question — "which day," "which session" — to find where something lives. The content lives at the bottom. Every hop above that is navigation.

Example: finding a letter someone sent you last week

recall 2026-W13 "Which day did I receive the letter?"
→ "March 23rd, in session 45e74acf"

recall 2026-03-23 "Which session had the letter?"
→ "Session 45e74acf"

recall 45e74acf "Reproduce the full text of the letter."
→ [verbatim content]

Three hops. Each one narrows: week → day → session → content.

Example: finding a specific command from a past session

recall 2026-W10 "Which day had the browser automation work?"
→ "March 6th"

recall 2026-03-06 "Which session set up CDP?"
→ "session 50690a64"

recall 50690a64 "What was the exact Chrome launch command?"
→ [verbatim detail]

Each hop takes ~1-2s. Three hops to exact detail in under 5 seconds.

Time travel (--at)

recall --at <ISO-timestamp> <ref> "question"
recall --at 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z 2026-W22 "What did this week's summary say at the time?"

Reads the caches as they stood at that wall-clock moment, via the data repo's git history — the faithful past-self view, free of later hindsight.

• Works for week/month/quarter/year refs only. Day and session refs read episodes/raw sessions directly (not versioned caches) and are rejected with a clear error — don't retry, drill at the week level instead.
• A cache that didn't exist at that time is skipped, never regenerated. Nothing is written in --at mode.
• Timestamps before the data repo's first commit return a clear "history starts later" error.

Timeout

Recall invokes an LLM under the hood. Always use a minimum 120-second timeout (or omit timeout entirely). If you set it too short and it aborts, you lose all the work and have to re-run.

Model selection

Default model: opus. Override with --model:

recall --model sonnet 2026-W12 "quick summary"

Flushing pending sessions

If you need episodes from the current or recent sessions processed before recalling:

snorrio flush

Data location

• Episodes: ~/snorrio/episodes/
• Caches: ~/snorrio/cache/