# tapes.dev
> AI-friendly documentation for tapes.dev

## Recommended agent setup

Agents work best against tapes with the `tapes` skill installed. It answers to
"check the tapes" and searches past sessions by meaning, so an agent recovers
earlier work instead of asking for it again.

    npx skills add papercomputeco/skills --skill tapes

- Guide: https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/check-the-tapes/
- Source: https://github.com/papercomputeco/skills/tree/main/skills/tapes

## Pages

- [See what your coding agents actually did.](https://tapes.dev/) - Record every LLM call your coding agents make, into a Postgres you own. Search sessions, track cost, replay runs. No SDK. Open source.
- [tapes documentation](https://tapes.dev/docs/) - Reference for the tapes server and its clients, synced from the repos that own each component.

### docs

- [HTTP APIs](https://tapes.dev/docs/apis/) - The read API and the private ingest API — their routes, their seals, and the trust boundary between them.
- [Architecture](https://tapes.dev/docs/architecture/) - How Tapes separates the immutable capture log from the derived session, trace, and span read model.
- [Running a cassette locally](https://tapes.dev/docs/cassette-walkthrough/) - Walk the hello-world cassette end to end on one machine, from compose up to driving its methods with the client.
- [Cassettes](https://tapes.dev/docs/cassettes/) - The manifest, admission rules, and deployment responsibilities for a service that extends the Tapes read API.
- [CLI reference](https://tapes.dev/docs/cli/) - The server's commands, the split between tapes and tapesctl, and how to prove the capture ratchet.
- [Configuration](https://tapes.dev/docs/configuration/) - How the server resolves its .tapes/ directory and settings, and how the client resolves its one server URL.
- [Inspecting and exporting data](https://tapes.dev/docs/data/) - Read captured sessions from the client, the built-in browser UI, an export bundle, or the HTTP read API directly.
- [Local development](https://tapes.dev/docs/development/) - Prerequisites, the Make-based build and test workflow, where the docs live, and how the OpenAPI seals work.
- [Export cassette](https://tapes.dev/docs/export/) - The Export cassette reference.
- [Guides](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/) - Journeys across tapes components, written on this site and walked end to end before publish.
- [Installation and local setup](https://tapes.dev/docs/installation/) - Install the server and the client, bootstrap the local PostgreSQL and Ollama dependencies, and start Tapes.
- [Agent integrations](https://tapes.dev/docs/integrations/) - The harnesses Tapes captures, which lane each one uses, and how to point a generic provider client at the transparent proxy.
- [Tapes](https://tapes.dev/docs/introduction/) - What Tapes captures, and a quickstart that takes you from install to a real captured session.
- [MCP](https://tapes.dev/docs/mcp/) - The read API's Model Context Protocol endpoint and the cassette tools it aggregates.
- [pgtapes](https://tapes.dev/docs/pgtapes/) - The pgtapes reference.
- [Search cassette](https://tapes.dev/docs/search/) - The Search cassette reference.
- [Skills cassette](https://tapes.dev/docs/skills/) - The Skills cassette reference.
- [tapes-crates](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/) - The tapes-crates reference.
- [tapesctl](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/) - The tapesctl reference.
- [Telemetry](https://tapes.dev/docs/telemetry/) - What the server's CLI reports to PostHog, how to disable it, and why the client reports nothing.

### export

- [API reference](https://tapes.dev/docs/export/api/) - The two export endpoints, their query parameters, response shape, download filenames, and status codes.
- [Deploying](https://tapes.dev/docs/export/deploying/) - The image, its configuration, the database grant the cassette needs, and how to point a running tapes at it.
- [Development](https://tapes.dev/docs/export/development/) - Build and test from a checkout, and what the test suite pins about the manifest.
- [Export cassette](https://tapes.dev/docs/export/introduction/) - Exports tapes sessions as JSONL, one line per session, at either full-span or turn-header granularity.

### guides

- [Check the tapes from your agent](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/check-the-tapes/) - Install the tapes skill so an agent searches past sessions on its own when you say "check the tapes".
- [Capture a Claude Code session](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/claudecode/) - Launch Claude Code under the tapes capture proxy, ship every turn to the server, and read the session back.
- [Capture a Codex session](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/codex/) - Launch the Codex CLI under the capture proxy, or capture the self-launching ChatGPT desktop app through lifecycle hooks.
- [Run the open-core stack with Docker Compose](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/docker-compose/) - Start tapes, PostgreSQL, Ollama, and the skills, search, and export cassettes from the source repository.
- [Capture local Ollama traffic](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/ollama/) - Put the tapes proxy in front of a local Ollama server and capture whatever an Ollama-compatible client sends through it.
- [Search captured sessions by meaning](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/search/) - Find past agent work semantically — from the client, over the read API, and piped straight into skill generation.
- [Turn captured sessions into skills](https://tapes.dev/docs/guides/skills/) - Extract a reusable skill from real sessions with an LLM, review it, and install it into an agent's skills directory.

### pgtapes

- [Build and publish](https://tapes.dev/docs/pgtapes/building/) - Build the image locally with Docker, and publish multi-platform images with Buildx.
- [What is in the image](https://tapes.dev/docs/pgtapes/image/) - The base image, extension versions, and the entrypoint and configuration mechanisms the build adds on top of it.
- [pgtapes](https://tapes.dev/docs/pgtapes/introduction/) - The PostgreSQL image the tapes server runs on — a CloudNativePG base with pg_duckdb and pgvector built in.
- [Run the image](https://tapes.dev/docs/pgtapes/running/) - Start the image with docker run or under the CloudNativePG operator, and what each path does and does not configure for you.
- [Image tags](https://tapes.dev/docs/pgtapes/tags/) - The tag scheme, why CloudNativePG constrains it, and which tags on the registry to use and which to avoid.

### search

- [API reference](https://tapes.dev/docs/search/api/) - The span search endpoint, the MCP tool over the same operation, the result shape, and status codes.
- [Deploying](https://tapes.dev/docs/search/deploying/) - The image, its configuration, the embedding providers it supports, and the database objects a deployment must provision.
- [Development](https://tapes.dev/docs/search/development/) - Build and test from a checkout, how the module relates to tapes, and what the test suite pins.
- [Embedding](https://tapes.dev/docs/search/embedding/) - The embed pass that keeps the span projection searchable — how it selects work, how it handles failure, and the metrics it exposes.
- [Search cassette](https://tapes.dev/docs/search/introduction/) - Semantic span search over the tapes read model, with the embedding pass that keeps it current.

### skills

- [API reference](https://tapes.dev/docs/skills/api/) - Stable skills, immutable revisions, visibility, latest resolution, and asynchronous generation.
- [Deploying](https://tapes.dev/docs/skills/deploying/) - Image identity, tenant-local dependencies, worker configuration, and durable storage.
- [Development](https://tapes.dev/docs/skills/development/) - Build and test from a checkout, and what the test suite pins about the manifest.
- [Skills cassette](https://tapes.dev/docs/skills/introduction/) - Stable skills, immutable private/public revisions, exact evaluation, and durable asynchronous generation.

### tapes-crates

- [Adding a harness](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/adding-a-harness/) - Teaching the crates about a new coding agent — the registry declaration, the launch recipe decision, the bar a new attribution lane must clear, and what breaks when the registry changes.
- [The harness regression matrix](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/harness-matrix/) - The CI tier that launches each real harness binary through a mock provider and a mock ingest, and asserts on what actually crossed the wire.
- [tapes-crates](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/introduction/) - The client-side Rust crates for tapes — the crate map, the boundary each crate owns, and how to take them from crates.io.
- [Releasing](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/releasing/) - How the three crates reach crates.io — dependency order, the tag scheme, what the release workflow checks, and the two-lock hold on the upload.
- [tapes-capture](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/tapes-capture/) - The capture protocol crate — the X-Tapes-* envelope and its budgets, the gateway environment contract with its two sub-protocols, and the peer-trust primitives.
- [tapes-client](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/tapes-client/) - The read client — one core contract sealed at build time, a deployment's cassettes discovered at start, one transport seam, and a credential hook instead of a transport.
- [tapes-harnesses](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapes-crates/tapes-harnesses/) - The harness-knowledge crate — the registry and its five axes, the three capture mechanisms, launch recipes, plugin artifacts, attribution lanes, and transcript discovery.

### tapesctl

- [How capture works](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/capture/) - The two capture lanes, which harness uses which mechanism, what attribution means, and why the session id start prints is not the one read commands take.
- [Cassettes](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/cassettes/) - The command surface your tapes deployment serves, discovered at runtime — how it is generated, how it is cached, and how to call it.
- [Command reference](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/commands/) - Every tapesctl command with its flags, environment equivalents, exit codes, and error families.
- [Configuration](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/configuration/) - How tapesctl resolves a server URL, the config.toml schema, and every file and directory it reads or writes.
- [tapesctl](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/introduction/) - The command-line client for tapes — what it does, the two server ports it talks to, and a first capture and read.
- [Troubleshooting](https://tapes.dev/docs/tapesctl/troubleshooting/) - The failures that actually happen — a capture that landed nowhere, a session id that 404s, a missing server URL, and plugin conflicts.


*Auto-generated documentation index*