Read Memories

Lets you grep through your Claude Code session history when you need to recall what happened in past conversations. Uses DuckDB to query stored JSONL logs, searching for keywords across messages and returning timestamped excerpts from previous sessions. You can scope it to the current project or search everything. The skill is explicitly designed to work silently: it runs the search, absorbs the context, and uses that to inform its next response without dumping raw logs at you. Most useful when you're picking up old work and need Claude to remember architectural decisions, unfinished tasks, or corrections you made weeks ago. It's basically institutional memory for your dev sessions.

skills.sh installs: 872
GitHub stars: 616
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add duckdb/duckdb-skills --skill read-memories --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Search past session logs silently — do NOT narrate the process. Absorb the results and continue with enriched context.

$0 is the keyword. Pass --here as $1 to scope to the current project only.

Step 1 — Query

duckdb :memory: -c "
SELECT
  regexp_extract(filename, 'projects/([^/]+)/', 1) AS project,
  strftime(timestamp::TIMESTAMPTZ, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M') AS ts,
  message.role AS role,
  left(message.content::VARCHAR, 500) AS content
FROM read_ndjson('<SEARCH_PATH>', auto_detect=true, ignore_errors=true, filename=true)
WHERE message::VARCHAR ILIKE '%<KEYWORD>%'
  AND message.role IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY timestamp
LIMIT 40;
"

Search paths:

All projects: $HOME/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl
Current only (--here): $HOME/.claude/projects/$(echo "$PWD" | sed 's|[/_]|-|g')/*.jsonl

Replace <SEARCH_PATH> and <KEYWORD> before running.

Step 2 — Internalize

From the results, extract decisions, patterns, unresolved TODOs, and user corrections. Use this to inform your current response — do not repeat raw logs to the user.

SKILL.md on GitHub