Restore one conversation

Outcome: read a past coding-agent conversation back in full — in order, untruncated — after the runtime that produced it has moved on, closed the session, or stopped mid-turn.

Risk: Read-only, external tool (DuckDB). Interface: transcript-lake sessions, transcript-lake search, transcript-lake show.

Preconditions#

• A Lake with at least one streamed session (transcript-lake status reports partitions).
• DuckDB 1.5.x on PATH; show reads through the canonical views.
• The session identifier. sessions, sessions --interrupted, and search all print it.

Inputs#

Steps#

Locate the conversation. Any of the three works; the last one is for a session that stopped without an answer:

transcript-lake search "transcript-label-trainer" --limit 5
transcript-lake sessions --runtime kimi --limit 10
transcript-lake sessions --interrupted --limit 10

Read it back:

transcript-lake show session_6ee965ab-4854-488a-9ca2-2515e9da3e07

Expected shape: an identity header (runtime, project, span, turn mix, selected types), then one block per event, oldest first, each opening with [<timestamp>] <event_type> and carrying the complete masked text, then the footer.

Reconstruct the complete record — reasoning, tool calls, tool results and metadata included — when the dialogue alone does not explain what happened:

transcript-lake show session_6ee965ab-4854-488a-9ca2-2515e9da3e07 --include all --limit 5000

Narrow to one dimension, for example only what the agent thought:

transcript-lake show session_6ee965ab-4854-488a-9ca2-2515e9da3e07 --include thinking

Hand the conversation to another program:

transcript-lake show session_6ee965ab-4854-488a-9ca2-2515e9da3e07 --include all --json > conversation.json

Verification#

• The header span matches the first_ts/last_ts that sessions reports for the same identifier.
• The footer reads rendered N of M matching events. N == M means the reconstruction is complete; N < M prints (raise --limit for the rest), so a cut is visible rather than silent.
• Events appear in ascending timestamp order, which is the order the conversation happened in.

Side effects and cleanup#

None. show reads Lake partitions through DuckDB views and writes nothing. Redirected output is the operator's file to keep or delete.

Representative failure#

transcript-lake show not-a-session

fails with unknown session "not-a-session": not present in the selected Lake (check the id or start the stream first) and a non-zero status; an unknown --include value is rejected with the exact list of accepted event types. Neither case prints a partial transcript.

Notes#

Text is masked Lake evidence, not the raw vendor transcript: secrets and high-entropy strings appear as [masked:…] placeholders. Hostname, timestamps, project paths, and model names remain, so treat an exported conversation as sensitive.