In a long session you ask a question. The answer lands several messages later, after tool calls, subagent notifications and other assistant text. Buried, not missing.
So you re-ask it. Scrolling costs time and re-asking costs tokens.
archie session asks builds the index instead: every question in the session, and
a pointer to the message that answered it.
What counts as a question
Two things, both detected without a model.
- A
?sentence in one of your turns. The turn is split into sentences; each qualifying sentence becomes its own entry. - A flag-prefixed line in an assistant turn. A line starting with a flag glyph, once a markdown list or bold prefix is stripped. That is the assistant asking you something.
Three statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
answered |
A substantive reply was found, and it does not read as a question itself. |
flagged_back_to_user |
The question was a flag line, or the first reply handed the question back. |
no_reply_yet |
No assistant text before the next user turn, or before the trace ends. |
An answer is the first assistant message carrying a line of at least 20 characters that is not filler — "waiting", "on it", "one moment". Tool calls, tool results and compaction records do not stop the scan; they are just not candidates. The excerpt runs from that line, trimmed to 200 characters.
Every entry carries a pointer — an event sequence and a timestamp. When there is an answer, it points at the answer. When there is not, it points at the question. There is always somewhere to jump to, even when the answer is nowhere yet.
No model reads the transcript. Three regexes and a line-length check.
Reading it
--unanswered narrows to the entries that are not answered — still open, or
flagged back to you. That is the list worth reading before you close a session.
--since takes RFC 3339, YYYY-MM-DD, or a relative duration like 2h, 30m,
1d, 3w.
--session also accepts a raw JSONL file path. If it is not an indexed session,
it is parsed directly.
Over MCP the same index is session_asks.
What to run
archie session asks --last
archie session asks --last --unanswered
archie session asks --last --since 2h
archie session asks --session 33122482
archie session asks --last --json