Code tab lost session index for a project (20+ sessions missing from sidebar, but .jsonl transcripts intact on disk)
Environment
- App: Claude desktop app, Code tab
- OS: Windows 10 Home 10.0.19045
- Project path: C:\Users\basti\Documents\Automat
Summary
The Code tab sidebar shows zero sessions for a project that has 25 session transcript files on disk. The app's session-management API (list_sessions, including include_archived: true) returns no results, and looking up a known session by its own ID (get_session) also returns "not found" - so this isn't a filtering/pagination issue, the app's session index genuinely has no record of these sessions.
Evidence data is NOT lost
All 25 .jsonl transcript files are present and intact at:C:\Users\basti\.claude\projects\C--Users-basti-Documents-Automat\
Dated between 2026-09-20 and 2026-09-28, ranging from ~120 KB to ~21 MB. Example session IDs still on disk but unknown to the app:
19b078b3-3f7e-45b3-b77c-12ec72a0059348c8a5ba-b6e0-4b87-9678-33508121ba0b- (23 more in the same folder)
Steps to reproduce
Unknown / happened spontaneously. The session index loss appeared out of nowhere, at the same time the desktop app stopped opening/launching correctly. No specific action was taken beforehand that's known to have triggered it.
Impact
Lost access to 20+ conversations from the Code tab UI - cannot browse, reopen, or resume any of them from within the app, even though the underlying data is safe on disk.
Expected behavior
The Code tab should either keep its session index in sync with the transcript files on disk, or fall back to scanning ~/.claude/projects/<project>/ for orphaned sessions and re-list them.