Find past work in your organization’s captured sessions by describing it. Search matches meaning, not exact keywords — “why did the deploy fail” finds the session where the agent debugged a broken release, whatever words it used. Prerequisite: authenticated paperctl.
Search
paperctl search "why did the deploy fail"Returns the matched turns, most relevant first, each with its session, model, and timestamp — enough to jump straight into the right session.
paperctl search "auth error" -k 20 # up to 20 matches (default 8)
paperctl search "auth error" --json # raw JSON for scripts and agents-k / --top caps how many matched turns come back. --json emits the raw result list — session id, trace id, score, prompt, and snippet per hit — instead of the styled output.
What you can find
Search covers the conversation content of your organization’s captured sessions. Sessions become searchable within about a minute of their content arriving. Some searches that pay off:
paperctl search "how we fixed the pgvector migration"
paperctl search "work on the billing service"
paperctl search "rate limit errors from anthropic"
paperctl search "session worth turning into a skill for release runbooks"Follow a hit with paperctl sessions get <session-id> or open it in paper console.
If results come up empty
- Just finished the session? Give indexing a minute and search again.
- Describe the work differently — search matches meaning, so a rephrase often lands.
- Confirm you’re in the right organization:
paperctl whoami, thenpaperctl org selectif needed.