Quickstart

Go from a fresh install to your first time-travel — clicking a message and watching your code snap back to how it looked at that moment — in under five minutes.

Chronicle's core trick is simple to experience but hard to forget: it lines up every message in an AI coding session against your Git history, so any point in the conversation becomes a window into the exact state of your code. This walkthrough gets you to that "aha" as fast as possible. If you haven't installed yet, start with Installation.

Before you start

Chronicle time-travels through Git commits, so pick a session whose project is a Git repository with some history. The more commits the project has, the more precisely Chronicle can reconstruct code between messages. A project with no repo still plays back the conversation — you just won't get the code snapshot pane.

You don't need anything else: no account, no API key, no network. Chronicle reads the logs your AI tools already wrote to disk.

Five minutes to first time-travel

1. Launch Chronicle. Open the app (or npm run dev and visit http://localhost:4173). You'll land on the Projects home. On first run it's empty with a "Welcome to Chronicle" prompt.

2. Import a session. Click + Import Sessions (top right). Chronicle scans the standard log locations for all six supported tools and shows you which ones it found. Pick a source — Claude Code is the richest if you have it.

3. Select what to import. The wizard lists projects and, where it can, individual sessions with NEW / Partial / Imported badges. New sessions are pre-selected. Hit Start Import — it's read-only, so your original logs are never touched. (Importing sessions covers the full flow.)

4. Open a project, then a session. Back on the home screen, click a project card, then click any session in its list. The session opens on the Overview tab (a stats dashboard). Switch to Playback from the left rail (or press ⌘2).

5. Click a message — this is the moment. Playback is a three-pane view: the conversation on the left, a code snapshot in the middle, and the TimberLine timeline along the bottom. Click any message and the middle pane rebuilds your file tree and file contents as they were at that moment, resolved to the nearest preceding commit. Files that changed in that commit are green-dotted and auto-selected. Press D to see the diff against the previous version.

That's it. Drag along the TimberLine to scrub through the whole session and watch the code evolve commit by commit. Time travel explains everything you're looking at.

Local-first: Every step above ran entirely on your machine. Chronicle made no LLM calls and no cloud requests — it parsed local logs into a local SQLite database and reconstructed code from your own Git history. Nothing about viewing a session leaves your laptop.

Where to go next

• Missing a source, or want to understand the badges? → Importing sessions
• Want the full playback / diff / timeline reference? → Time travel
• Curious what the Overview tab is telling you (cost, active duration, context)? → Session insights

Related

• Installation — get Chronicle onto your machine first.
• Importing sessions — the import wizard, the six tools, and read-only guarantees.
• Time travel — playback mode, snapshots, diff, and the TimberLine in depth.