Check the tapes from your agent

Capture is only half the loop. The other half is the agent reaching for what was captured without being told how — you say “check the tapes”, and it searches past sessions by meaning and answers from what it finds.

The tapes skill is what teaches it that. It is a plain instruction file the agent loads when your phrasing matches, so any harness that reads skills picks it up: no MCP server, no plugin, no code changes.

Install

The skill lives in the Paper Compute skills repo. Install it with the skills CLI:

npx skills add papercomputeco/skills --skill tapes

The CLI asks which agents to install for and writes to that agent’s project skills directory. Choose the global directory and skip the prompts when you want it in every project:

npx skills add papercomputeco/skills --skill tapes -g -a claude-code -y

Nix users can take it through flake-skills instead, so the skill arrives with the dev shell rather than as a separate install step:

shellHook = skills.mkSkillsHook {
  skills = [ "tapes" ];
};

Use it

Nothing to invoke. The skill declares the phrasing it answers to, and the agent loads it when your message matches:

• “check the tapes”
• “search tapes for …”
• “look up sessions about …”
• “what did I work on …”

Ask in those terms and the agent runs the search itself, then answers from the sessions it found rather than from the current context window:

check the tapes for how we fixed the retry logic

The skill’s own file is worth reading before you rely on it — it is short, and it is the exact text your agent will follow: skills/tapes/SKILL.md.

Before this works

The skill searches; it does not set search up. It needs a server with semantic search working, which is what the quickstart provides:

tapes local up
tapes serve

If the agent comes back empty-handed, walk the chain yourself before blaming the skill — it runs the same search you can:

tapes status
tapesctl search "any past work"

A search that fails here fails there too, and the search guide walks the chain in order.

Next steps

• Search captured sessions by meaning — what the skill runs on your behalf, and how to drive it yourself.
• Turn captured sessions into skills — generate new skills out of the sessions this one finds.