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Resume AI Coding Sessions Across Any CLI - cli-continues

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cli-continues – Resume AI Coding Sessions Across Any CLI

Modern AI-assisted development rarely lives inside a single tool. You might start coding with one assistant, hit a rate limit, then jump to another — only to realize you’ve lost all your context.

That friction is exactly what cli-continues aims to eliminate.

cli-continues is a lightweight open‑source command-line utility that lets you continue your AI coding sessions across differentCLI tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Gemini CLI, Codex, Cursor Agent, and more — without manually copying prompts or re-explaining your project.

In short: it helps your AI coding context travel with you.

Why cli-continues Exists

If you regularly work with multiple AI coding tools, you’ve probably experienced:

  • Interrupted sessions due to rate limits
  • Losing conversation history when switching tools
  • Repeating the same explanations to different models
  • Manually pasting long chat logs or diffs

cli-continues solves this by extracting structured context from one tool and injecting it into another.

Your workflow stays continuous.

What Gets Transferred

cli-continues doesn’t just move chat messages. It captures:

  • Recent conversation history
  • File edits and patches
  • Working directory information
  • Shell commands
  • Tool metadata and reasoning blocks

This richer context allows the next AI assistant to understand what you were doing, not just what you said.

Key Features

Cross-tool session handoff

Resume sessions between multiple AI CLIs without starting over.

Automatic session discovery

Scans supported tools and finds existing sessions automatically.

Interactive picker

Choose sessions using a simple terminal UI when multiple matches exist.

Scriptable mode

List or resume sessions programmatically for automation workflows.

Minimal setup

Runs instantly with NPX or a single global install.

Getting Started

You can try cli-continues without installing anything:

npx continues

Or install globally:

npm install -g continues

Common commands:

continues

Launch interactive session picker.

continues list

List all detected sessions.

continues resume <id> --in gemini

Resume a specific session in another tool.

How It Works (High Level)

Each supported AI CLI stores session data differently — JSON, SQLite, or custom formats.

cli-continues:

  1. Scans those locations
  2. Extracts meaningful context
  3. Structures it into a transferable format
  4. Feeds it into your target tool

While there’s no universal session API yet, cli-continues provides a practical bridge between ecosystems.

Who Is This For?

cli-continues is ideal for:

  • Developers using multiple AI assistants
  • Teams experimenting with different models
  • Anyone hitting rate limits mid-debug
  • Power users building agent-based workflows

If continuity matters to your coding flow, this tool pays for itself instantly.

Final Thoughts

AI coding tools are powerful — but fragmented.

cli-continues brings continuity to that fragmentation.

Instead of restarting conversations or rebuilding context, you simply move forward.

It’s a small utility with a big impact on developer productivity.

Project repository: https://github.com/yigitkonur/cli-continues

Feel free to explore, contribute, or adapt it into your own AI workflows.