Most newcomers don’t realise remembers and that you can come back to them. Three commands cover most cases:
claude --continue— resumes the most recent session in the current directory. The fastest way back to “where I was last night”.claude --resume— opens a picker showing your recent sessions. Use when you have several going (one per feature) and want to pick.claude --from-pr 142— jumps back into the session that produced #142 (Claude links sessions to PRs you open withgh pr create).
Why this matters: a session that’s worked through a feature has already read the relevant files, understood the conventions, and built up the working mental . Starting fresh means re-grounding all of that from your and a cold . The resumed session is better-informed, not just faster.
Name your sessions or the picker is useless
claude --resume shows a list. If every entry is an opaque ID, you’ll pick the wrong one or give up. Name the ones worth returning to:
claude --name invoice-rounding-bugThe name shows in the prompt box, the /resume picker, and your title. Two seconds at the start of a session, and the picker becomes navigable.
A small trick when you resume: ask Claude where you left off. There’s a built-in for it —
/recap“Generate a one-line session recap now.” Or ask in your own words if you want more than a line:
Quick recap — what were we doing in this session and what’s the next step?
Forty words of Claude’s own context, written by Claude in its own words, is a better re-entry point than your half-remembered notes.
On a very long session you may be offered a summary-based resume rather than a full one. That’s the same lossy trade /compact makes — fine for picking up the thread, worse for the specifics. If the session mattered, a written handoff beats either. See the handoff-not-summary tip.
When not to resume: when the topic has changed. Pulling yesterday’s “fix the auth bug” session into today’s “design the cart ” task gives you the worst of both worlds — Claude has stale context AND mixed topics. Start fresh for unrelated work.
Pair this with the One session, one task tip. The sessions you keep should be the focused ones; the unfocused ones should have ended yesterday.