Memory and resumability

Agents have no episodic memory, so the reasoning and decisions behind a feature, worth more than the git history itself, vanish the moment the session that built it ends. It's like a coworker who built half the system, then left for another job, leaving you to reverse-engineer what they were thinking.

Polygraph gives your agent episodic memory. Every session is a recorded episode: agent traces, session descriptions, repos, branches, pull requests, and linked issues. You can recall an episode, resume it, or reference it from new work.

More than a handoff file

Picture a team working together. One member does some work, then hands it off to another. Today, people serialize that into a handoff file: check out this branch, read this markdown. That is a description of the work, not the work itself.

Polygraph captures the state of the world along with it. Resuming isn't a copy-paste into the agent's memory. It is a time machine that drops you exactly where the original author stopped. The agent can inspect the repos, follow the pull requests and issues, and run commands with the old context available.

This applies to any work done by anyone in the organization, no matter how cross-cutting. Every session feeds one shared memory, so your agent builds on what the whole team did. And your agent can pull any of it in and investigate it further.

Resume a session

Resume a session when you want to continue the same work. You can resume a session you created or a session someone else handed to you. It works across machines, operating systems, and AI agents.

polygraph session resume <session-id>

You can omit the ID and select a session from the list:

polygraph session resume

When you resume, Polygraph reconstructs the session state as closely as possible: repos, branches, agent traces, and the relevant agent context.

Reference another session

Resuming continues the same session. Referencing uses a prior session as context for a new piece of work.

Use a reference when the original work is done, but its context still matters. For example, if an issue is discovered weeks after some work landed, start a new session and reference the original session. The new agent can inspect the prior plan, decisions, comments, pull requests, and repo state without re-deriving them from scratch.

To reference a session, attach it through MCP resources if your agent supports them (using the "@" symbol in Claude Code). You can also mention the session ID directly:

Include the context of session <session-id> and figure out why this issue occurs.

Referencing extracts the relevant information for the new task:

• For a high-level question, the session summary may be enough.
• For a detailed investigation, Polygraph can inspect pull request descriptions, agent logs, and code.

Polygraph records referenced sessions in the new session timeline. To link sessions explicitly, use polygraph session link-reference.