loi — life of ideas, light

Claude Code deletes its transcripts after about thirty days. loi keeps them, and everything around them that you would need later to see how an idea evolved, in a private store on your disk. It does nothing else.

Everything stays on your machine. loi never uploads, syncs or sends anything anywhere. It has no network code, no account, no telemetry and no cloud. The store is a folder on your own disk (~/.loi, readable only by you), and the only things that leave it are the ones you move yourself.

Install

uv tool install life-of-ideas    # or: pipx install life-of-ideas

The package on PyPI is life-of-ideas; the command it installs is loi. Python 3.11 or newer, no dependencies.

Use

cd ~/your/repo
loi init                    # once per clone: installs the hooks, imports the sessions Claude Code still holds
loi ls                      # the sessions recorded for this repo
loi verify                  # re-hash every stored file against its record
loi capture                 # copy the newest open session now (--session ID for another one)
loi capture --backfill      # import every session Claude Code still holds (e.g. after a reinstall)

loi init prints what it touched:

loi init: /Users/you/your/repo
  .loi/config.toml             created (id 01M4SMD0F7ATJM7CKTP0Z29MS0)
  .loi/local.toml              created (home = ~/.loi)
  .gitignore                   created: .loi/local.toml, .claude/settings.local.json
  .claude/settings.local.json  hooks installed
  ~/.loi/projects/01M4SMD0F7ATJM7CKTP0Z29MS0/ created
  registry                     added
  hook command: ~/.local/bin/loi
Commit .loi/config.toml and .gitignore. Each collaborator runs `loi init` once per clone.

Three files land in the repo. .loi/config.toml is the project's id: commit it, so every clone records into the same project. .loi/local.toml (which store this checkout uses) and .claude/settings.local.json (the hooks) are per user and go into .gitignore.

The hooks are SessionStart, SessionEnd and PreCompact, each running ~/.local/bin/loi hook claude-code <event>. They always exit 0, never write into the repo, and read git with optional locks off, so Claude Code never notices them. Session start records the hook payload and git HEAD; session end and every compaction copy the session's files into the store. loi init is idempotent: running it again repairs rather than duplicates. Pass --no-backfill to skip the import of existing sessions.

What it keeps

Everything lives under ~/.loi/projects/<id>/. For every session, in sessions/claude-code/<session-id>/:

And per project, next to sessions/:

Everything is plain files: JSON, JSONL, gzip. gunzip -c gives you the original. Each file is recorded with its size and sha256, and loi verify checks them all. Files over 200 MB are skipped and logged.

Where the store is

~/.loi by default (dirs 0700, files 0600). LOI_HOME in the environment wins; otherwise the path pinned in .loi/local.toml by loi init --home PATH; otherwise ~/.loi.

The store may hold what Claude's own files hold, including MCP environment values from .claude/settings*.json and anything you pasted into a session. Nothing in it is ever transmitted: it stays local unless you copy it somewhere yourself. If you point LOI_HOME at a synced folder (iCloud, Dropbox), that sync is yours, not loi's.

Stopping

uv tool uninstall life-of-ideas (or pipx uninstall life-of-ideas), then remove the three loi entries from .claude/settings.local.json, or the file itself if nothing else is in it. The store is yours: it stays until you delete it.

Status

Pre-alpha. Hooks, capture, backfill, ls and verify work for Claude Code on Linux and macOS. Not yet: importing sessions from a loi store, a periodic capture to bound loss on a crash, Codex.

License

Apache-2.0