In the next ten minutes you’ll capture a real AI coding session, open a complete record of everything your agent did, and find it again just by describing it. That session is the first entry in something bigger: a permanent, searchable history of your team’s AI work.
Before you start
- A
paper consoleaccount - Claude Code, Codex, or Pi installed and working in your terminal
- A real project where an agent session is safe to run
Milestone 1 — prove capture
paperctl records the session locally while you work — the conversation, tool activity, token usage, and cost. How capture works explains exactly what ends up in a session, worth a skim before your first run.
Install paperctl
curl -fsSL https://download.papercompute.com/install | shNo sudo — the installer puts paperctl in ~/.local/bin and adds it to your PATH via your shell rc. Open a new terminal if the command isn’t found immediately, then confirm:
paperctl --versionExpected: the version number, for example paperctl 0.21.1.
Authenticate
paperctl loginFollow the browser flow, then confirm who you’re signed in as:
paperctl whoamipaperctl status shows the rest: the daemon running, auth healthy, and your org and gateway selected. You’re wired up — everything you capture from here lands in your console.
Run a captured session
From a project directory, launch your agent through paper:
paperctl start claudepaperctl start codexpaperctl start piThen use the agent normally. (Codex authenticates to OpenAI a few different ways — pick the path that matches you.)
For a first session, give it a small but real investigation rather than a summary request — real work produces searches, file reads, and decisions worth capturing:
Find where authentication errors are handled in this project, explain the current behavior, and suggest one small improvement. Don’t change any code until you’ve inspected the relevant files.
Confirm the session was captured
paperctl sessions listYour session is the top row — name, model, status, turn count, cost — and it’s already in paper console. That’s milestone one: work that used to vanish when the terminal closed is now permanent history.
Milestone 2 — prove the value
Captured is only half the point. paper console is where the session becomes history you can explore — open it, price it, and find it again by meaning.
Open the session
Click the session in paper console. Everything your agent did is in front of you as one explorable timeline: Chat is the conversation you remember having; flip to All activity and see what was happening underneath it — every tool call next to its result, subagents nested where they ran, the decisions between your prompt and the answer. Session Info prices the whole thing: cost, duration, tokens. “What did it actually do?” is now a click, not a reconstruction.
Explore a session detail pageLive demo — the activity timeline and the Session Info rail, filled with sample data
Understand session details tours the whole page.
Find it by search
No session name to remember, no branch, no commit, no scrolling through terminal history — just describe what happened:
paperctl search "improvement to auth error handling"Search matches meaning, so the words don’t have to be the ones the agent used. Results come back most-relevant first, each naming its session so you can jump straight back in. A session becomes searchable within about a minute of capture, so if it’s not there yet, that’s the reason. From now on, everything you capture is findable this way — Search session history has more patterns worth stealing.
Make capture the default
You typed paperctl start claude this time. One line in your shell rc means you never have to again: shell routing makes plain claude, codex, and pi route through paper on their own. From that point forward, every session is captured automatically — the history builds itself.
What compounds from here
Today it’s one session. In a few weeks it’s dozens — and that’s when the history starts answering questions you couldn’t ask before: how was that dependency problem solved, what has anyone tried on this service, which workflows burn money without finishing. Insights surfaces those patterns as real usage accumulates, and the sessions worth repeating become Skills — the best work anyone on your team has done with an agent, packaged so everyone’s agent can do it. The session you just captured is entry one.
paper consoleThe workspace, session details, and Insights.CLI overviewEverything paperctl does, mapped by outcome.Publish your first skillTurn a captured session into reusable knowledge.Troubleshoot captureDaemon, auth, and connection checks.If the session doesn’t appear
The most common cause: the agent was started directly (plain claude) instead of through paperctl start. Launch it through paper — or set up shell routing so that can’t happen — and see Troubleshooting for the full checklist.