Total Recall

Let your assistant find the work you've already done.

Your Claude Code and Codex sessions can search every past session: decisions, code patterns, and solutions become retrievable context. It is not a search box; the AI pulls in what it needs as part of its current work.

Issue trackers remember what work exists. Total Recall helps recover why decisions were made and how the work unfolded.

When to use it

Recover decisions

Ask why a design changed, what tradeoff was accepted, or where a bug was first diagnosed.

Resume old work

Ask the assistant to find the last useful context before reopening a branch or issue.

Reuse a solution

Ask how you solved a similar problem before, in this project or another, instead of working it out again.

Good prompts

Instead of	Try
"Search old chats."	"Use Total Recall to find where we discussed sign-in handoff for hosted Cloud."
"What happened with docs?"	"Use Total Recall to find the planning conversation for the public docs IA."
"Find that build error."	"Use Total Recall to search for the Swift 6 warning we fixed in CloudSettingsView."

How it works

Total Recall depends on the Contextify CLI. The assistant skill calls the CLI, and the CLI searches the Contextify database.

Total Recall can only find sessions that Contextify has indexed locally. If a new conversation is missing, let the app finish processing or run CLI ingestion first.

For what stays local, what can sync, and how Cloud affects data movement, see Privacy and data and Ingestion and syncing.

Set up your assistant

Total Recall runs through the Contextify CLI, which installs the skill your assistant calls. How you install it depends on how you run Contextify, so pick your setup:

1. Set up the CLI and skill

The Contextify app set this up when you installed it, so there is nothing to install here. Go straight to Confirm it works below. If the skill is ever missing, repair it from Settings → CLI → Install / Repair CLI.

The sandboxed App Store build cannot install the CLI itself, so install it with Homebrew, then add the skill:

brew install PeterPym/contextify/contextify-query
contextify install-plugin

Install the CLI, then add the skill:

curl -fsSL https://contextify.sh/install.sh | sh
contextify install-skill

2. Confirm it works

Start a fresh Claude Code or Codex session and type /total. If the assistant suggests total-recall as you type, the skill is installed and ready. Ask for something from a while back to see it work:

Use Total Recall to find how we fixed the last deploy failure.

A good response names the search it ran and returns specific context from earlier indexed sessions.

3. If it does not autocomplete

Confirm the CLI is on your PATH:

contextify --version

No version, or a "command not found" error, means the install above did not finish, so re-run it for your setup. If a version prints, the CLI is fine and the skill just is not registered with your assistant yet, so finish with the steps for your assistant:

Restart Claude Code, then type `/total` again

Quit and reopen Claude Code so it reloads skills. Closing one terminal pane may not be enough if another Claude Code process is still running. The skill lives at ~/.claude/skills/total-recall/SKILL.md.

Still stuck	Likely cause	Fix
Claude does not know Total Recall exists.	The skill is missing or Claude was not restarted.	Re-run the install for your setup above, then fully restart Claude Code.
The skill runs, but search says the database is missing.	Contextify has not created or found the local database.	Open Contextify once, then run `contextify status`.
Results are too broad.	The query is generic.	Search with a task ID, file name, branch, error text, or unusual phrase.

Make sure Codex is loading skills, then restart it

Codex shows Total Recall only when skills are enabled. Check codex --help for the skills flag your version uses, start Codex with skills on, then type /total again.

Contextify copies the skill (Codex ignores symlinked skill directories) into both locations Codex reads:

$CODEX_HOME/skills/total-recall/SKILL.md
~/.agents/skills/total-recall/SKILL.md

If contextify doctor shows those files in place and the skill still does not appear, restart Codex once more before reinstalling.

Once the skill works, Claude Code and recent Codex versions can also use the bundled contextify-researcher agent for broader multi-query searches.

Last updated: May 31, 2026