Use Episodic Memory to search past assistant conversations

Who it is for

This skill is for people who already have Claude Code or Codex sessions and want to recover past discussions, decisions, and patterns by meaning. It gives semantic search over historical conversations, not another empty chat.

It is not a general notes app. The better use is: you remember roughly what was discussed and need the assistant to bring back the original text from indexed sessions. If you have no history yet, install first, finish indexing at the end of one session, then search.

Official notes:

https://github.com/obra/episodic-memory

First try in 3 minutes

The official install command is only this one:

/plugin install episodic-memory@superpowers-marketplace

Run it in Claude Code. That installs the plugin and brings search and session-view capabilities. Do not add another marketplace or npx install. The page says the plugin indexes conversations automatically at the end of each session and makes history searchable in natural language.

After install, do a low-risk read. If you already have history, search at once. If you just installed and have no index yet, first end a harmless session, wait for auto-index, or use the sync command in the docs. Sync processes local history; confirm you want those sessions indexed before running it.

The search example from the page:

episodic-memory search "React Router authentication"

Success signal: it returns history snippets related to the query, not an empty result that pretends to remember. Do not change product code for this first run.

Use cases

Case 1: Review an old discussion in natural language. Evidence says the plugin exposes search and session-view capabilities and lets history be retrieved in natural language. Ask about a topic you did discuss. This is a read; it does not change old sessions. If the result is empty, first confirm auto-index at session end already ran.

Case 2: Sync from the command line, then search. Evidence gives episodic-memory sync, and episodic-memory search plus a query. The first time you can sync first, then use the page example query or a keyword of your own. sync touches the local index; confirm before running. search stays read-only. The cited notes do not name other subcommands; do not invent operations that delete history.

Limits

The first run uses only the plugin install above. The repository also contains a Codex plugin manifest, but Codex support needs codex-cli 0.130.0 or newer. Do not invent hook steps that are not written.

Indexing happens after a session ends or after you run sync yourself. Search without an index returns empty. It searches assistant conversations, not an arbitrary document library. The cited notes do not say how to turn off auto-index, and they do not name other installers.