Sessions

Sessions are the unit of work in Continuum. Each session ties an agent to a working directory, runs in a daemon-managed runtime, and persists its transcript as a JSONL file.

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Spawn options

When you create a new session, the sheet lets you configure:

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Local vs. Worktree mode

Local runs the agent in the repo’s primary checkout directory. Worktree creates or uses a git worktree so the agent works on a branch without touching your main checkout. Worktree sessions get a city name from a pool of 200 cities (CityPool). Assignments persist via CityNamer so the same session always carries the same city. City names appear in the iOS sidebar, the Watch complication, and Live Activities.

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Continuing a past session

Every JSONL file in ~/.claude/projects/ and ~/.codex/sessions/ that was touched in the last 30 days appears as a “Recent” row in the sidebar.

• Click to open the file as read-only chat.
• Right-click → Continue here to resume: Continuum reads the CLI’s own session id from the file header (JSONLSessionId — Claude’s sessionId field or Codex’s payload.id), spawns a new runtime with --resume <id> (Claude) or resume <id> (Codex), and pins the new session to the same JSONL so history is continuous.

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Sub-chats

Cmd+; branches a sub-chat off the currently open session. Sub-chats are full sessions with their own transcripts. They appear nested under the parent in the sidebar via parentSessionId. Branching is useful when you want to explore an alternative approach without affecting the main session.

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Archive and search

Sessions can be archived from the context menu. Archived sessions are hidden by default; the Show archived toggle in the sidebar reveals them. The search field filters across all visible session titles.

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Scheduled follow-ups

SessionScheduler is a daemon-side timer that observes the session registry. If you schedule a follow-up message for a session, the timer fires it through the session runtime at the specified time. Scheduled follow-ups survive daemon restarts.

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Artifacts

When an agent writes a file, it appears in the Files tab of the session detail (Code review pane on Mac, Files tab on iPhone). Tapping a file opens it with QuickLook. The daemon endpoint that serves artifact bytes canonicalizes the path and requires it to live under the session’s worktree — paths outside the worktree (e.g. ../../../etc/passwd) are rejected. The cap is 50 MB per file.

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Sources

The Sources pane lists every file and URL the agent cited via Read, Grep, Glob, and WebFetch tool-use blocks. Use it to audit what the agent actually consulted.

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Related

• Plan mode — plan/code toggle, approve flow.
• Diffs and PRs — diff and PR panes in session detail.
• Composer — the composer, attachments, and send flow.
• Code — the full three-pane workbench layout.