Add non-destructive context export for cross-session knowledge sharing
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Feb 5, 2026 by iglodia Closed Feb 9, 2026
Problem
When working on long sessions, there's no way to share context with a new session without compacting the current one. /compact is destructive — it replaces the full context with a summary in-place.
Common scenario: I'm deep in a debugging session and want to spin up a parallel session for a related task. The new session has zero context about what I've been doing.
Suggested feature
A non-destructive context export/import mechanism:
# In current session (context stays intact):
/export-context [file-or-label]
# In new session (loads the summary as initial context):
/import-context [file-or-label]
How it would work
/export-contextgenerates a structured summary of the current session (decisions made, files changed, key findings, current state) and saves it — without modifying the current session's context/import-contextloads that summary into a fresh session, giving the new agent immediate awareness of prior work- This is fundamentally different from
/compact(destructive, in-place) and/resume(continues same session, no parallelism)
Current workarounds
- MEMORY.md: Persistent but limited (200 lines), requires manual curation, and is global (not session-specific)
- Manual file export: Ask Claude to "write a summary to a file", then in new session "read that file" — works but clunky
/resume: Continues the same session rather than creating a new one with shared context
Use cases
- Parallel work streams: Debug session + implementation session on related code
- Session handoff: End of day summary → next morning pickup in fresh session
- Team collaboration: Export context for another developer's Claude session
- Long projects: Periodic context snapshots without losing full conversation detail
Bonus ideas
- Auto-structured export format (files touched, decisions, TODOs, current blockers)
- Named context snapshots (multiple exports from same session)
- Expiring/timestamped contexts for relevance tracking
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