Session Management

Every ByteMind conversation lives inside a session. Sessions are automatically persisted to disk so you can stop and resume work at any time without losing context.

How Sessions Work

• Each session has a unique ID (e.g. abc123def)
• Session data is stored in .bytemind/ in your working directory
• When you start bytemind chat, it creates a new session or lets you resume an existing one
• The full message history is preserved, so the agent has context for follow-up tasks

Listing Sessions

/sessions

Shows a table of recent sessions with IDs, start times, and message counts. Pass a number to limit results:

/sessions 5

Inspecting the Current Session

/session

Displays the current session's ID, workspace path, message count, and a brief summary.

Resuming a Session

/resume abc123

You can use the full ID or a unique prefix. The agent loads the full conversation history and you can continue where you left off.

Starting a New Session

/new

Creates a fresh session in the current workspace. The previous session remains saved and can be resumed later.

Practical Patterns

Long refactors across multiple days

Start a refactor session, do a chunk of work, /quit. Come back the next day:

bytemind chat
/sessions
/resume <id from yesterday>

Parallel workstreams

Use /new to create a separate session for a different feature branch so contexts don't mix.

Reviewing what was done

/session

Shows a summary of tools called and changes made in the current session.

Storage Location

Session files are stored at .bytemind/sessions/ relative to the working directory where you ran bytemind chat. Use BYTEMIND_HOME to override the .bytemind/ base directory.

See Also

• Chat Mode — where sessions are used
• Environment Variables — BYTEMIND_HOME override
• CLI Commands — full command reference