PSA: your claude code sessions are on disk as plaintext json, including everything you ever pasted

i went looking for something i'd done weeks ago & found out claude code keeps the whole thing locally. this seems to be news to a lot of people so here it is.

they live in ~/.claude/projects/ / .jsonl, one folder per project, one file per session. on windows that's C:\Users\you\.claude\projects\.

each line is a json object. user turns, assistant turns, and crucially the tool calls & their results, so it's not just the conversation, it's what actually got run and what came back.

three things that made it worth knowing:

grep works. rg "some command" ~/.claude/projects finds the thing you half remember from three weeks ago, in the session where you actually ran it.

you can audit what an agent really did rather than what it said it did. the tool_result entries are the ground truth.

they're bigger than you'd think. one project on my machine has 71 session files, and the largest single session is 35mb. if you've been using it daily since launch, that's real disk.

worth knowing: they're plaintext json, so whatever you pasted into a session is sitting there unencrypted. if you've ever pasted a key into a prompt, it's in one of those files.

anyone doing anything smarter with them? i've only got as far as grep.