What is carafe?
Carafe is an AI developer tool that preserves and organizes AI coding agent sessions on your local machine, built for developers who move between assistants like Claude Code and Codex. It acts as a continuity layer: it captures each coding session, lets you search past work by content, replay session history, and hand a session off to a different agent without losing context. Everything stays local. The command line covers the core jobs: carafe list shows recent sessions across tools, carafe search "<terms>" finds sessions by content, carafe key-moments <id> extracts the decisions and breakthroughs from a run, and carafe handoff <id> generates handoff markdown you can paste into the next agent. There is also a browser-based UI for search and replay (carafe ui), worktree snapshots via carafe checkpoint and carafe undo, and a menu bar app for quick handoffs. Skills for Claude Code and Codex let you ask questions like "What did we decide about the retry queue last week?" directly inside the agent. The base tool is free and open source under Apache-2.0; a paid Pro tier adds person-to-person sharing, PR stories, and decision ledgers. For anyone comparing AI tools for coding-agent memory on BestAIFor, Carafe is a strong fit when session continuity and local-first history matter.
What is carafe used for?
Capturing, searching, replaying, and handing off AI coding-agent sessions across tools like Claude Code and Codex.
How much does carafe cost?
Carafe Pro
Pricing not published — adds person-to-person sharing, PR stories, and decision ledgers
Pros and cons
Pros
- Local-first session capture keeps all coding history on your machine
carafe handoff <id>generates handoff markdown to move a session between agentscarafe key-momentsextracts decisions and breakthroughs from a session- Browser UI plus CLI search and replay of past sessions
- Free and open source under Apache-2.0
Cons
- Pro tier pricing (sharing, PR stories, decision ledgers) is not published
- Scoped to AI coding-agent sessions, not general project or doc management
- Early version (0.1.0) so feature set and integrations are still maturing
- Primarily a CLI/menu-bar workflow, so non-terminal users face a learning curve
Questions about carafe
What is Carafe used for?
Carafe captures AI coding agent sessions from tools like Claude Code and Codex on your local machine, so you can search past work, replay session history, extract key decisions, and hand a session off to a different agent without losing context.
Is Carafe free?
Yes. The base Carafe tool is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license. A paid Carafe Pro tier adds person-to-person sharing, PR stories, and decision ledgers, but its pricing is not published.
Does Carafe keep my coding sessions private?
Yes. Carafe stores and indexes sessions locally on your own machine, so search, replay, and handoff all work against local data rather than a cloud service.
How does Carafe hand off a session to another AI agent?
Running `carafe handoff <id>` generates handoff markdown summarizing a session that you can paste into a different coding agent, and dedicated skills for Claude Code and Codex let you query prior session history directly.
What are the best alternatives to carafe?
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