Skip to content

opencode writes its session transcripts into the Claude config directory

This is a finding

Something I found or learned, or a discovery that cost time once: cheap by design, and true of a moment rather than in general.

A machine that has never run anything from Anthropic still accumulates hundreds of files in ~/.claude/transcripts, one per session, named ses_<id>.jsonl. They are opencode sessions. The oh-my-openagent plugin resolves its own storage against the Claude config directory:

var TRANSCRIPT_DIR = join75(getClaudeConfigDir(), "transcripts");
function getClaudeConfigDir() {
  const envConfigDir = process.env.CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR;
  if (envConfigDir) return envConfigDir;
  return join28(homedir14(), ".claude");
}

The same constant appears again in the plugin's session-manager tools, alongside a sibling todos/ directory, so the tools that list and search sessions read back from the same place.

Telling the two apart takes one look at the filenames. opencode names a session ses_f4b95fe3bffeZm7KqJHiiNpxtH; Claude Code uses a UUID, and files it under ~/.claude/projects/<slugified-cwd>/ rather than a flat directory. A ~/.claude holding transcripts/ and no projects/ was written entirely by opencode.

CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR moves all of it, since the plugin reads that variable before falling back to the home directory. That is the whole fix, with one consequence worth knowing in advance: it moves the todos and the session history together, and any real Claude Code install on the same machine follows it too.

Why it surfaced

The transcripts are worth finding because session_search will not find them for you. It scans MAX_SESSIONS_TO_SCAN = 50 sessions and stops, so on a machine with 489 transcripts it covers about the last fortnight. A session from ten days earlier is absent from the results whilst its file sits on disk, and the search reports no matches rather than reporting a truncated scan.

rg over ~/.claude/transcripts answers the same question against every session, which is the workaround for any search that has to reach further back than the cap.

Observed with opencode 1.18.32 and oh-my-openagent 4.19.4.

The following pages link to this page: