What is recall-reasoning?

The recall-reasoning skill enables Claude agents to search through historical reasoning, decision logs, and build attempts to retrieve successful patterns and avoid past mistakes. By indexing artifact handoffs and reasoning files, it provides critical long-term memory and context, allowing the agent to learn from previous sessions and maintain continuity in complex, multi-stage projects.

When should I use recall-reasoning?

recall-reasoning is useful in the following scenarios: • Accelerating development by retrieving successful implementation patterns and logic from similar tasks performed in past sessions. • Preventing repetitive errors by searching post-mortems for approaches that were previously marked as failed or dead ends. • Investigating the rationale behind specific architectural decisions or code changes by querying historical reasoning files and commit context. • Debugging recurring or complex issues by searching through past build attempts, test failures, and the specific fixes that eventually succeeded.

name	recall-reasoning
description	Search past reasoning for relevant decisions and approaches
user-invocable	false

Recall Past Work

Search through previous sessions to find relevant decisions, approaches that worked, and approaches that failed. Queries two sources:

Artifact Index - Handoffs, plans, ledgers with post-mortems (what worked/failed)
Reasoning Files - Build attempts, test failures, commit context

When to Use

Starting work similar to past sessions
"What did we do last time with X?"
Looking for patterns that worked before
Investigating why something was done a certain way
Debugging an issue encountered previously

Usage

Primary: Artifact Index (rich context)

uv run python scripts/core/artifact_query.py "<query>" [--outcome SUCCEEDED|FAILED] [--limit N]

This searches handoffs with post-mortems (what worked, what failed, key decisions).

Secondary: Reasoning Files (build attempts)

bash "$CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR/.claude/scripts/search-reasoning.sh" "<query>"

This searches .git/claude/commits/*/reasoning.md for build failures and fixes.

Examples

# Search for authentication-related work
uv run python scripts/core/artifact_query.py "authentication OAuth JWT"

# Find only successful approaches
uv run python scripts/core/artifact_query.py "implement agent" --outcome SUCCEEDED

# Find what failed (to avoid repeating mistakes)
uv run python scripts/core/artifact_query.py "hook implementation" --outcome FAILED

# Search build/test reasoning
bash "$CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR/.claude/scripts/search-reasoning.sh" "TypeError"

What Gets Searched

Artifact Index (handoffs, plans, ledgers):

Task summaries and status
What worked - Successful approaches
What failed - Dead ends and why
Key decisions - Choices with rationale
Goal and constraints from ledgers

Reasoning Files (.git/claude/):

Failed build attempts and error output
Successful builds after failures
Commit context and branch info

Interpreting Results

From Artifact Index:

✓ = SUCCEEDED outcome (pattern to follow)
✗ = FAILED outcome (pattern to avoid)
? = UNKNOWN outcome (not yet marked)
Post-mortem sections show distilled learnings

From Reasoning:

build_fail = approach that didn't work
build_pass = what finally succeeded
Multiple failures before success = non-trivial problem

Process

Run Artifact Index query first - richer context, post-mortems
Review relevant handoffs - check what worked/failed sections
If needed, search reasoning - for specific build errors
Apply learnings - follow successful patterns, avoid failed ones

No Results?

Artifact Index empty:

Run uv run python scripts/core/artifact_index.py --all to index existing handoffs
Create handoffs with post-mortem sections for future recall

Reasoning files empty:

Use /commit after builds to capture reasoning
Check if .git/claude/ directory exists

recall-reasoning

When & Why to Use This Skill

Use Cases