Manage session state, resumption, and forking
What you should be able to do
- Resume a specific prior conversation by name rather than relying on whatever ran last.
- Fork a session to explore divergent approaches from one shared analysis baseline.
- Decide between resuming and starting fresh with an injected summary, from whether prior tool results are still true.
- Tell a resumed session which files changed, so re-analysis is targeted rather than total.
Exam traps (5)
Resume the session after a refactor and carry on where you left off.
The stored tool results describe code that no longer exists, and nothing marks them stale — so the agent reasons confidently about deleted functions.
Resumption carries prior results forward as if current. Say what changed, or do not resume.
Always resume — it preserves context and saves re-reading everything.
When most of the prior context has gone stale you are paying to carry wrong information, and correcting it costs more than rebuilding.
Resume when prior context is mostly still valid; otherwise start fresh with a structured summary of what was learned.
Fork the session to keep working on the same thread.
Forking is for divergence. Using it for linear continuation leaves parallel branches nobody reconciles, and later work lands in whichever one was open.
Fork to compare two approaches from a common baseline; resume to continue one.
Rely on resuming the most recent session.
Any other work in between silently becomes the thing you resume, and the mistake is invisible until the context is obviously wrong.
Name investigations you intend to return to, and resume them by name.
Have the resumed session re-explore the codebase so everything is definitely current.
It spends the context budget rebuilding knowledge that was mostly still valid, which is the cost resumption existed to avoid.
Name the files that changed and ask for targeted re-analysis of those.
Primary sources
- Agent SDK — sessionschecked 2026-08-15
- Claude Code — CLI referencechecked 2026-08-15
Know cold
- Run / session state
- Named session resume (--resume)
- fork_session
- Resumability
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