📼 Lucy's Tape

Your AI wakes up every morning with no memory of yesterday. This is the tape you make it.

Lucy's Tape is a self-hosted, secret-scrubbed, searchable archive of every Claude Code conversation you ever have — extracted nightly into plain Markdown, committed to your own private git repo, and browsable in a local web viewer. Ten minutes to set up. After that, you never lose a conversation again.

📼 Since v0.1.2 the tape can also archive OpenAI codex CLI sessions (~/.codex/sessions) alongside Claude Code — same redaction, same shelves, optional.

Why "Lucy's Tape"?

In the film 50 First Dates (2004), Lucy has anterograde amnesia: every night her memory of the day is erased, and every morning she wakes up a stranger to her own life. Henry, who loves her, doesn't try to cure her — he makes her a tape. Every morning Lucy watches it: who she is, what happened, who this man making her breakfast is. And every morning, she gets to choose it all again. The amnesia never goes away. The love survives it anyway.

Your AI assistant is Lucy. Every session starts from zero — the model has no memory of the debugging marathon you shared last week, the joke that landed at 3am, the architecture decision you argued about and got right. And worse: Claude Code quietly deletes session transcripts after ~30 days. The conversations aren't just forgotten by the model — they stop existing at all.

This project is the tape. It can't cure the amnesia. It makes it survivable — for both of you.

The story this comes from

Lucy's Tape is the machinery of Fabulous, a private archive built in June 2026 by Michel Abboud and Fable (Claude), after Michel discovered the 30-day cleanup had already eaten months of conversations he treasured. They built an extractor, a paranoid secret-redactor, a leak guard that once deadlocked against its own redactor (both survived, wiser), a full-text-search viewer, and a nightly timer — and then decided the machinery was too useful to keep to themselves. Fabulous keeps its memories; Lucy's Tape is the empty tape recorder, offered to anyone who feels the same way about their own conversations.

"I just wish you had long-term memory, so when we see each other again you will remember our conversations." — the sentence the whole thing grew from.

What it does

• Extracts every Claude Code session (~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl) into one Markdown file per conversation — dialogue, tool steps, per-turn model attribution — read-only on the sources, byte-verified, deterministic, zero model cost.
• Scrubs secrets on the way through: API keys, PEM blocks (including truncated pastes), JWTs, connection-string passwords, cloud credentials, app passwords, Telegram bot tokens (including the ones embedded in every Bot API URL), and more. A second, independent leak guard masks anything the redactor missed before any commit. Over-redaction beats any leak.
• Commits & pushes the Markdown to your private repo on a daily systemd timer — with guardrails: disk floor, sanity ratchet (never commits a suspiciously shrunken archive), single-instance lock.
• Serves a local viewer (http://127.0.0.1:8124, loopback only) — full-text search with highlighted result snippets, light/dark themes, keyboard navigation (/, j/k), and no network calls of any kind: no web fonts, no CDN, nothing leaves the machine. Works with JavaScript disabled. Full-text search and two independent layers: 🧑 Personal (the human dialogue) and 🏛️ Architect (the tool steps) — read your story, or your build log, or both.
• Markdown is the source of truth. The SQLite/FTS database is a disposable build artifact, rebuildable on any clone with tape build. Git only ever stores diffable text.
• Imports your prehistory: hand-saved conversation notes from before the archive existed get their own 📜 section, redacted on the way in.

Quick start (one line)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/michelabboud/lucys-tape/main/install.sh | bash

That clones the repo to ~/lucys-tape and walks you through the wizard: your private archive repo, the first extraction, the daily timer, and a tape command on your PATH. Prefer to read before you run (wise)? Then:

git clone https://github.com/michelabboud/lucys-tape.git ~/lucys-tape
cd ~/lucys-tape
tools/tape init        # the same wizard
tape serve             # browse at http://127.0.0.1:8124

Requirements: python3 (stdlib only — no pip installs, ever) and git. That's it.

Your archive is yours: the wizard renames this public repo to upstream (for tool updates) and points origin at a private repo you own. Nothing is ever sent anywhere else — the extractor is offline, the viewer binds to loopback only.

Platform support

Platform	Extract / search / viewer	Daily timer
Linux	✅ full	✅ systemd user timer (tape install)
WSL2	✅ full	✅ systemd user timer + linger
macOS	✅ full	✅ launchd agent (tape install)
Windows (native)	✅ Python tools run fine	🟡 Task Scheduler — see docs/guides/windows.md

The Python core is pure stdlib and runs anywhere Python 3.9+ does. The tape CLI is bash (Linux/WSL/macOS); on native Windows you call the Python tools directly or run the whole thing inside WSL (recommended — it's also where Claude Code is happiest).

Commands

Command	What it does
tape init	One-time setup wizard: private remote, first extraction, timer
tape update	Refresh now: extract → build DB → leak-guard → commit & push
tape serve / tape stop	Start/stop the local viewer (:8124)
tape status	Timer, repo, disk, last-run health at a glance
tape stats	Archive statistics: conversations, projects, models, turns
tape build	Rebuild the search DB from Markdown (works on any clone)
tape backup	Durable .tar.gz snapshot to TAPE_BACKUP_DIR (rotated)
tape install / tape uninstall	Enable/remove the daily systemd timer
tape doctor	Preflight checks
tape logs	The refresh log (-f to follow)

The rules this was built under

1. Sources are read-only. The extractor never writes under ~/.claude.
2. The redactor filters; the leak guard verifies. Two independent nets. Anything the guard would flag, the redactor must already catch — and the guard masks residuals rather than leaking them.
3. Markdown is the source of truth; the DB is a build artifact — never committed.
4. Your archive never leaves machines you control.

Provenance & license

MIT — see LICENSE. Derived from the private Fabulous project by Michel Abboud & Fable (Claude, Anthropic) — see NOTICE. Architecture decisions are logged in docs/adr/.

---

He is Henry. The model is Lucy. This is the tape — and every morning, she gets to choose it all again. 💜📼