Total Recall: Local Knowledge Graph for Claude Code Conversation History

What Total Recall Does

Total Recall solves the problem of re-explaining decisions across Claude Code sessions by making conversation history searchable. Claude Code stores conversations as JSONL files in ~/.claude/projects/, with each line containing a message object (role, content, timestamps, ID, parentUuid). These parent references form a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) because conversations branch with tool calls and interruptions.

Technical Implementation

The system ingests JSONL transcripts into a SQLite database with:

• Full-text search
• Vector embeddings using local Ollama (no cloud) with nomic-embed-text
• Semantic cross-linking
• DAG-aware retrieval that walks parent chains backward from search hits
• Project-based session tagging

When you ask a question like "What was that restaurant with the great chile rellenos?", Claude queries the database and returns actual conversation excerpts with surrounding context, not summaries.

Additional Features

• A "where were we" script shows the last 20 messages from the most recent session
• ChatGPT importer that authenticates via Playwright and calls the backend API to pull full conversation trees with timestamps, model metadata, DALL-E images, and code interpreter outputs
• Auto-ingests every 15 minutes
• Everything is local - one file you can copy to another machine

Current Deployment

The creator's deployment handles:

• 28K chunks
• 63K semantic links
• 255 MB storage
• 49 sessions across 6 projects

Open Source Availability

The repository at https://github.com/aguywithcode/total-recall contains:

• Full pipeline (ingest, embed, link, retrieve, browse)
• ChatGPT scraper
• Setup instructions
• CLAUDE.md integration guide
• Background documentation with the full build story