openloops

Tells you what your Claude Code sessions were doing — and still tells you after the transcripts are gone.

Claude Code keeps a full JSONL transcript of every session, then garbage-collects it after about a month. Meanwhile the thing you actually wanted from that session — what it did, what it left for you, how to get back to it — was one paragraph at the end. openloops reads the transcripts, writes one short dated markdown digest per session, and keeps the digests. It is a retention device, not a dashboard.

No model is called. No network request is made. No account, no credentials, no configuration: it reads files you already have and writes files you already own.

Install

pip install openloops

That puts an ol command on your PATH. Python 3.10+.

Quick start

CLI

ol                          # sync, then show what your sessions left open
ol ls --state all           # every digest, newest first
ol ls --confidence high     # drop the ones open only because nothing said otherwise
ol show 2b1f                # one digest, by session id or a unique prefix
ol status                   # where the digests are, how many, how stale the cache is
ol install-job              # run the sync every 15 minutes (macOS launchd)

Python API

import openloops

openloops.sync()  # read transcripts → write digests
for row in openloops.ls(state="open"):  # what your sessions left open
    print(row["session"], row["title"])

print(openloops.show("2b1f")["text"])  # one digest, in full

What a digest says — and what it never says

A digest is a dated record of what one session said. It carries the session's last turn, the prompt that provoked it, a context-compaction summary if the session made one, and any pull-request links the session recorded for itself. Every heading carries the timestamp of the thing under it.

It never says that anything is currently true. There is no "still open", no "more to do", no "waiting on you" — because openloops has checked nothing against the world, and a snapshot presented as a live fact is worse than no snapshot at all. The front matter says verified: false for exactly that reason.

This is the constraint the whole design is arranged around. A tool that quietly tells you a loop is open when you closed it out of band destroys the count, and the count is the product.

open/ and archive/ are loop state, never process state

Digests are filed under open/ or archive/ by how the session's own last turn read — not by whether a claude process is running. Five rules decide it, and the digest always prints which one fired and what cues it saw, so you can disagree with it:

Rule	Reads as
the last turn is a usage-limit or API-error notice	open — it was cut off
the transcript stops before the assistant's turn completed	open
the closing line is a question put to you	open
the latest cue in the closing lines defers something	open
the latest cue in the closing lines declares it finished	archive
nothing decided it, but the session's own recap does	either
nothing decided it at all	open, marked low confidence

archive is earned, open is the default. A session only reaches archive by saying it finished. Against hand-labelled sessions the cue rules never produced a false archive but caught only about half the genuinely finished ones — and that is the right direction to be wrong in, because a false archive buries a loop this tool exists to surface, while a false open only lengthens a list already sorted by recency.

Conflicts resolve at sentence granularity, and inside a sentence an open cue always beats a close cue. Real closing paragraphs carry both kinds: "say the word and I'll remove it. Nothing is blocking; safe to close" is finished, and "you're safe to exit … the two threads waiting for you are" is not — the last cue-bearing sentence decides those. But "Needs you (nothing blocking, all tracked): the #146 decision" puts the close cue inside a parenthetical of the sentence that hands work back, so within one sentence the asymmetry decides instead of position.

Expect most sessions to land in open/. That is what agentic sessions do, and a split that came out balanced would be a split that was lying. ol ls --confidence high drops the ones that are open only because nothing said otherwise.

If open ever came to mean "a process is running", this would be a session dashboard. It is not one, and claude already has that view.

Where things are stored

~/.local/share/openloops/digests/{source}/open/{session}.md
                                          /archive/{session}.md
~/.local/state/openloops/sync-state.json      ← a cache, not data

{source} is this machine. Two machines syncing digests into one git repository never write the same path, so there is no merge to reconcile — the directory layout is the answer to cross-machine sync. The label seeds from the machine's short hostname and is then sticky, remembered in the state directory: macOS renames a host that collides on a network, and a label that drifted would silently fork the store into two copies. Every ol sync prints the label it is writing under, and OPENLOOPS_SOURCE overrides it.

The cache is deliberately somewhere else. Deleting it re-reads every transcript and must produce byte-identical digests; deleting the digests loses whatever the transcripts no longer hold. Those are very different operations and they should not live in the same folder.

Override with OPENLOOPS_DATA_DIR, OPENLOOPS_STATE_DIR, OPENLOOPS_SOURCE.

The two seams

Both are one keyword argument, and both default to something that already works:

openloops.sync(
    transcript_source=my_sessions,  # any Mapping[str, Session]
    digests_store=my_store,  # any MutableMapping[str, str]
)

transcript_source= defaults to a direct reader of Claude Code's on-disk layout. digests_store= defaults to a dol store over a directory of markdown files, with its encoding pinned to UTF-8 and its delete made a real delete. Point it at an S3-backed store, or at a git-synced directory shared between machines, and nothing else changes.

Pass state_dir= too when you swap a seam in a test: the change-detection cache is separate from both, and left alone it would record your fixture's revisions in the real one.

Keeping it up to date

ol install-job              # a launchd StartInterval agent, every 15 minutes
ol job-status               # installed? loaded? when did it last actually write?
ol uninstall-job

It is a periodic job, not a daemon, and that is a decision rather than an implementation detail: a tick that crashes is repaired by the next one, whereas a resident process that dies leaves its last output behind with nothing scheduled to correct it. ol job-status reports when a tick last wrote, because "the job is registered" and "the job is working" are not the same claim.

The installer is macOS-only. On Linux, put the same command in a systemd user timer or a crontab line — openloops itself is cross-platform.

Nothing leaves without being scrubbed

Transcripts are the highest-entropy secret source on a developer machine: pasted tokens, .env contents, tracebacks full of absolute paths. A digest store can be a synced git repository, so a written digest is an export surface, and the discipline belongs before the first byte is written rather than before the first push.

• Absolute paths under your home directory are rewritten to ~-relative.
• Credential-shaped text raises. It is never silently redacted, because a silent redaction teaches nobody that a secret was there. That session is skipped, the run says so and exits non-zero, and the error names the pattern class and offset without ever quoting the match.

Why not just read the transcripts, or use claude itself?

claude shows you your live sessions, which is a different question — and a better answer to it than this could be. The transcripts themselves answer the question openloops answers, right up until they are deleted. A digest is a few hundred bytes and outlives the megabyte it came from.

There is one caveat worth knowing before you read a digest as a diary: a Claude Code session is not a sitting. Sessions get resumed, so a single session can span days, and a digest keyed on one is a digest of a thread of work rather than of an afternoon.

What openloops is NOT (yet)

It does not track what you owe your agents, or what they owe you. That is the project's headline claim, and it is withheld pending a measurement rather than unfinished: whether an obligation ledger is worth building depends on whether agents actually file the asks they raise, and that number had not been measured. Publishing a ledger before measuring would be construction in search of a justification.

So this release contains no obligation, no ledger, no GitHub write, no MCP server, no model call and no notification surface. What it does contain is the instrument the measurement needs — the same extractor that writes digests answers "did this session end with a question directed at the human?" — which is why it ships first.

The name

Two live collisions, both deliberate, both worth knowing before you search for it:

• OpenLoops is an established particle-physics one-loop amplitude library (openloops.hepforge.org). It is not on PyPI, and it is what a web search will find first.
• openloops is also a browser-history tool that groups your browsing into what you were trying to do — an adjacent product using the same metaphor, in a different distribution channel.

Neither blocks pip install openloops. The command is ol because a read path that costs eighteen characters to reach is a read path that does not get reached.

Design tests

These are tests in the suite, not aspirations:

• A digest is derived, never authored. Delete the digest store and the cache, sync again, and every digest whose transcript still exists comes back byte-for-byte. Digests whose transcripts have since been collected are retained — that is the point of the tool — and ol status counts them separately.
• The suite passes with no network, no credentials, and no ~/.claude present.
• import openloops does not import the CLI library. The core has no opinion about how it is called.
• Nothing in this repository carries an absolute home path or credential-shaped text — checked mechanically, by the same code that scrubs your digests.

License

Apache-2.0.