bug: Sessions missing from claude --resume list

[dharmendrasdlt]

Bug Description

Sessions are missing from the claude --resume session list. When a session ends, Claude prints a resume command like:

Resume this session with:
claude --resume "session title here"

But when you run claude --resume, the session does not appear in the list at all — it is simply absent, not a search issue.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Start a Claude Code session and do some work
2. Exit the session — Claude prints Resume this session with: claude --resume "..."
3. Run claude --resume
4. The session that just ended is not in the list
5. Searching for the session title also returns "No sessions match"

Expected Behavior

All sessions (including recently closed ones) should appear in the claude --resume list.

Actual Behavior

Sessions are randomly missing from the list. The full session list shows a limited number of sessions (e.g. "1 of 23") and recently closed sessions or sessions from certain projects/contexts are not included — even immediately after they close.

This appears to affect both old and new sessions across different projects.

Environment

• Claude Code CLI (latest)
• macOS
• Reproducible across multiple sessions and projects

Screenshots

(Screenshots to be attached — showing a session that just ended with a resume command, then the resume list missing that session, and additional examples of sessions not found)

[github-actions]

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

1. sessions-index.json not updated, causing claude --resume to show stale/missing sessions #25032
2. /resume slash command shows "No conversations found to resume" despite sessions existing on disk #49128
3. /resume picker hides sessions with mixed cwd history (after project directory rename/move) #46522

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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[dharmendrasdlt]

[FrankLedo]

Ran into this less than an hour after creating a session. Was given a resume ID (3184712f-12a7-4759-862a-d3b862a9d2d2) via the /resume link, but running /resume 3184712f-12a7-4759-862a-d3b862a9d2d2 returned "Session was not found." The session also did not appear in the /resume picker list. This was on macOS, same machine, same working directory, within ~1 hour of the original session.

[coolcorexix]

The picker just isn't reading them correctly. The underlying JSONL is intact; you're not losing work.

Workaround that's gotten me unstuck:

Pass the session ID directly — you don't need to go through the picker:

# The resume command Claude prints at the end of a session includes the session ID
# You can also find it in the project directory:
ls ~/.claude/projects/<your-project-dir>/

# Then resume directly by ID
claude --resume <session-uuid>

If you don't remember the ID but remember what you were working on, I built a small open-source CLI called ccfind (claude-grep) specifically for this — it does full-text search across all your ~/.claude/projects/ JSONL files, bypassing the broken index entirely. You search by anything you remember from the conversation (function name, error message, question you asked), and it gives you a one-keypress resume. Sharing it here since it was born from this exact frustration — full disclosure, I'm the maker.

The root cause here seems to be the sessions index not updating reliably (related to #26123). Would be good to get a fix upstream, but at least the data isn't gone.