loil — life of ideas, light

Claude Code deletes its transcripts after about thirty days. loil 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. loil 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 (~/.loil, readable only by you), and the only things that leave it are the ones you move yourself.

What it keeps

For every Claude Code session of a repo you loil init:

And per project: snapshots of Claude's project memory and of the repo's agent configuration (CLAUDE.md, .claude/…) whenever they change, your prompt history for the project with the pasted text it references, and Claude's own sessions-index.json.

Everything is plain files: JSON, JSONL, gzip. gunzip -c gives you the original. Each file is recorded with its size and sha256, and loil verify checks them all.

Use

uv tool install loi-light    # or: pipx install loi-light
cd ~/your/repo
loil init                    # hooks into .claude/settings.local.json; imports the sessions Claude still holds
loil ls                      # the sessions recorded for this repo
loil verify                  # re-hash every stored file
loil capture --backfill      # import again (e.g. after sessions ran on another machine)

The store is ~/.loil (dirs 0700, files 0600). Set LOIL_HOME or loil init --home PATH to keep it elsewhere. Nothing large or sensitive goes inside the repo: it gets .loil/config.toml (commit it; it is the project's id) and two gitignored per-user files.

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

Status

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

License

Apache-2.0