How to Never Lose Your AI Coding Context Again
If you've ever watched your Claude Code session management fall apart mid-refactor, you already know the pain I'm about to describe. And if you haven't, give it time. It will happen.
I was three hours into a session with Claude Code last month. Big migration. Postgres to a new schema, rewriting queries, updating the ORM layer. Around hour two, Claude suggested a really clean approach to handling the backward-compatible views. I said "that's smart, let's do it" and kept going.
Then my terminal crashed.
Not Claude's fault. Not anyone's fault, really. My laptop decided it was time for a kernel panic. When I rebooted and opened a new session, everything was gone. The conversation, the reasoning, the specific approach to those compatibility views. I could see the code changes in git, sure. But the context behind them? The fifteen back-and-forth messages where we worked through the tradeoffs? Vanished.
I spent forty minutes trying to reconstruct what Claude had suggested. Forty minutes. That's when I decided to save AI coding context properly, or go insane trying.
The Problem Is Bigger Than You Think
Here's what bugs me about the current state of AI coding tools. They're genuinely good at writing code. Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex, Gemini CLI. I use them daily and my output has roughly doubled. But the way we interact with them is still stuck in 2023-era chat window thinking.
You type. The AI responds. You type more. It responds more. The conversation scrolls up. And up. And up. Until eventually you can't find anything, your context window fills up, the session ends, and all of that rich back-and-forth just... disappears.
Git captures the what. Your commit says "migrate user_sessions table to new schema." What it doesn't capture is the twenty-minute conversation where you and Claude debated three migration strategies, rejected two because of edge cases with existing data, hit a foreign key constraint on the third attempt, and finally found a path that worked. That conversation was the most valuable artifact of the entire session. And it's gone.
This isn't a minor inconvenience. I've talked to dozens of developers dealing with the same thing. AI coding session recovery is basically impossible with current tools. Your options are: scroll through terminal history (good luck), search the AI tool's internal logs (if they even exist), or just accept the loss and start over.
None of those options are acceptable when you're building real software.
What Actually Goes Wrong
Let me be specific about when this hurts, because "losing context" sounds abstract until it happens to you.
The crash scenario. Your terminal dies, your laptop restarts, your SSH connection drops. Whatever the cause, the session is interrupted and you're starting from scratch. Claude Code does store some session data locally, but navigating those raw files is like reading a database dump with your eyes.
The "where did that go" scenario. You had a great conversation two days ago. Maybe three days. You remember the AI had a good idea about error handling, or caching, or something with the authentication flow. You know it happened but you can't find it. Your recent sessions blur together into one long stream of prompts and responses.
The context window rollover. Long sessions hit token limits. The AI starts forgetting earlier parts of the conversation. You notice it's repeating suggestions or contradicting something it said an hour ago. The context that made the session productive is getting pushed out the window, and there's no way to manage that.
The cross-tool problem. Maybe you used Cursor for the frontend components and Claude Code for the API layer. Now you need to revisit a decision that spanned both tools. Good luck piecing that together from two separate chat histories with no shared timeline.
I Built Something to Fix This
After that kernel panic incident, I started building Mantra. The pitch is simple: it's a time-travel tool for AI coding sessions.
Mantra watches your AI coding tools in the background. It automatically snapshots every conversation turn. And it gives you a visual timeline where you can browse, search, restore, and diff any past state of your codebase tied to any moment in any conversation.
Think of it as git, but for the conversations themselves.
It runs locally on your machine. No cloud. No account wall. No telemetry on your session content. Your conversations stay on your laptop.
How the Time Travel Actually Works
This is the part I'm most proud of, so let me explain it properly.
Mantra uses your Git history as a foundation. When you click on any message in a past conversation, it finds the nearest Git commit to that timestamp and reconstructs what your codebase looked like at that exact moment. You see the file tree, the full file contents with syntax highlighting, and you can toggle a diff view to see what changed between any two points.
The interface has three panels. On the left, the full conversation with timestamps. On the right, the code snapshot for whatever message you've selected. And at the bottom, a timeline bar with color-coded markers: blue for your messages, green for Git commits, gray for AI responses. You can drag along it, hover for details, or click to jump anywhere.
It's the kind of UI that makes you wonder why it didn't exist already.
Supported Tools
Mantra currently works with:
- Claude Code (v1.0.0+) -- full support including conversation import, time travel, message filtering, content redaction, and file tree browsing
- Cursor (v0.40.0+) -- full support, with partial support back to v0.35.0
- Gemini CLI (v1.0.0+) -- full support with minor gaps in some tool call data
- Codex (v1.0.0+) -- full support
Windsurf support is on the roadmap and coming soon.
Project Management Across Tools
Here's something I didn't plan initially but turned out to be really useful. Mantra automatically detects when sessions from different tools point to the same project directory and groups them together.
So if you used Claude Code for the backend and Cursor for the frontend of the same repo, those sessions show up as one unified project. No manual linking. No folder organization. Mantra figures it out from the file paths and aggregates everything into a single view.
Beyond Replay: Control and Secure
Session replay is the core, but Mantra solves two other daily pain points I kept running into.
⚙️ MCP Control Center
If you use more than one AI coding tool, you've probably set up MCP services multiple times. Add a tool to Claude Code, then add it again to Cursor, then again to Gemini CLI. It's the same work done three times.
Mantra's MCP Hub lets you add any MCP service once. Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex all share the same gateway automatically. Same goes for Skills — configure once in Mantra, distribute across all your tools.
Smart Takeover imports your existing Claude Code or Cursor configs with a diff preview, so you can see exactly what changes before committing. Atomic backup means you can roll back instantly.
🔒 Sensitive Content Detection
AI coding sessions accumulate sensitive data. You paste an API key to test something. You reference a database password in a query. Tokens end up in tool call logs.
Before I added this to Mantra, I'd occasionally share a session for a code review and only realize after that it contained credentials. The local Rust engine now scans every session automatically. It flags API keys, passwords, tokens, and internal URLs. One-click redaction strips them before you export or share anything.
Both of these run locally. No data leaves your machine.
Getting Started
Mantra runs on macOS (12.0+, Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows (10+, x64), and Linux (Ubuntu 20.04+, Fedora 35+, Debian 11+).
macOS:
# Download the DMG for your architecture
# Apple Silicon
curl -L -o Mantra.dmg https://github.com/mantra-hq/mantra-releases/releases/latest/download/Mantra_0.9.1_macos-arm64.dmg
# Intel
curl -L -o Mantra.dmg https://github.com/mantra-hq/mantra-releases/releases/latest/download/Mantra_0.9.1_macos-x64.dmg
open Mantra.dmg
Linux:
# Debian/Ubuntu
curl -L -o mantra.deb https://github.com/mantra-hq/mantra-releases/releases/latest/download/Mantra_0.9.1_linux-x64.deb
sudo dpkg -i mantra.deb
# Fedora/RHEL
curl -L -o mantra.rpm https://github.com/mantra-hq/mantra-releases/releases/latest/download/Mantra_0.9.1_linux-x64.rpm
sudo rpm -i mantra.rpm
# Or use the AppImage
curl -L -o Mantra.AppImage https://github.com/mantra-hq/mantra-releases/releases/latest/download/Mantra_0.9.1_linux-x64.AppImage
chmod +x Mantra.AppImage
./Mantra.AppImage
Windows:
Download the MSI installer or the setup exe from the releases page.
Once installed, just open Mantra and start coding. It picks up your sessions automatically. No config files, no hooks to set up, no changes to your workflow.
Minimum requirements are 4GB RAM and 500MB disk space, though 8GB RAM and an SSD will give you a smoother experience with larger projects.
Real Workflows That Changed for Me
I want to share a few specific ways Mantra changed how I work, because abstract feature lists don't tell you much.
Debugging AI-introduced regressions. Last week I had a bug that turned out to be introduced by Claude Code three sessions ago. Without Mantra, I would have done git bisect, found the commit, and stared at the diff trying to figure out why that change was made. With Mantra, I scrubbed back to that exact session, found the conversation turn where Claude made the change, and immediately saw that it had misunderstood a constraint I'd given it. Five-minute fix instead of a thirty-minute archaeology project.
Onboarding a teammate. A junior developer on my team needed to understand how I'd built out the event processing pipeline. Instead of writing up documentation or doing a screen share, I just sent them the Mantra session. They could replay the entire process, see my prompts, see Claude's suggestions, see where I pushed back and why. Better than any documentation I could have written.
Personal recall at 11pm. I know I solved a caching problem elegantly two weeks ago. I don't remember which project, which session, or even which AI tool I used. With Mantra, I search across everything, find it in seconds, and copy the approach. Without Mantra, I'd be re-solving it from scratch.
Privacy and Content Redaction
I want to address this directly because I know developers care about it (and they should). Mantra is local-first. Your session data lives on your machine. Period.
When you do want to share a session, the built-in content redaction lets you strip out API keys, credentials, internal URLs, and anything else sensitive before exporting. You control exactly what leaves your machine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Mantra send my coding sessions to a server?
No. Mantra is entirely local. Your session data stays on your machine. There is no cloud sync, no analytics on your conversations, and no account required to use the tool. You can export sessions manually when you choose to share them.
Can I use Mantra with Claude Code and Cursor at the same time?
Yes. Mantra monitors multiple AI tools simultaneously and automatically groups sessions that target the same project directory. You get a unified timeline across all your tools without any manual configuration.
What happens if I lose a session before installing Mantra?
Mantra includes an import wizard that can recover past sessions from your AI tools' local data. For Claude Code, it reads the existing session artifacts on disk. For Cursor, it pulls from workspace data. The recovery isn't always perfect for very old sessions, but it works well for recent history.
Is Mantra free?
Mantra is free during early access. The first 50 users get lifetime free access with no limitations.
What's Next
The current version is v0.9.1. It's pre-1.0 software, and I use it every day. You will probably find rough edges. I'd rather ship something useful now and iterate than wait for perfection.
Coming up: Windsurf support, improved search and filtering across sessions, and better team sharing workflows. If you have opinions about what should be prioritized, I genuinely want to hear them.
You can grab Mantra at mantra.gonewx.com, read the full docs at docs.mantra.gonewx.com, file issues on GitHub, or come talk to me on Discord.
If you've ever lost an AI coding session and felt that particular kind of frustration, give it a try. And if it saves you even one "what did I do last Tuesday" moment, it was worth building.
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