pi-archive

Minimum viable personal agent: save every message to a SQLite DB.

A Pi coding agent extension that creates a searchable SQLite archive of every Pi session ever. Every message (user, assistant, tool results, bash executions) is saved locally and indexed for full-text search.

The agent can search its own history via the search_archive tool, and you can search manually with the /archive command.

Install

pi package add @gordonb/pi-archive

How it works

Pi stores sessions as JSONL files on disk. This extension syncs those files into a SQLite database at .pi/archive.db in your project directory.

• On session start: all past session files for the project are synced into the database.
• After each agent turn: the current session file is incrementally synced.
• On shutdown: the database connection is closed cleanly.

Sync is idempotent — re-syncing the same file is a no-op. Appended entries are picked up incrementally by comparing file sizes.

What's stored

Every JSONL entry is parsed into structured columns:

Column	Description
role	user, assistant, toolResult, bashExecution, custom, …
tool_name	Tool name for tool result entries
model	Model ID (e.g. claude-sonnet-4-5)
provider	Provider (e.g. anthropic)
text_content	Extracted searchable text
raw_json	Full original JSONL line

The tree structure of conversations is preserved via parent_id, so you can walk branches. Session metadata (cwd, timestamps, parent session for forks) is tracked in a separate sessions table.

Text content is indexed using SQLite FTS5 for fast full-text search.

Usage

/archive command

Search your archive or view stats from the Pi prompt:

/archive authentication JWT
/archive stats

search_archive tool

The agent can search past conversations automatically. It's guided to use the tool when you reference past work. You can also ask it directly:

Search our past conversations for when we discussed the database schema.

The tool accepts FTS5 query syntax:

• Phrase search: "REST API"
• Boolean: authentication AND JWT
• Prefix: Graph*
• Negation: REST NOT GraphQL

Results are ordered by timestamp (newest first) and include highlighted snippets.

Direct SQL

The database is just a SQLite file. You can query it directly:

sqlite3 .pi/archive.db "SELECT text_content FROM entries WHERE role = 'user' ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 10"

Development

Requires Node.js 22+ (uses node:sqlite).

npm install
npm test

License

MIT