# Retrieve Past Development Context

Teams lose track of decisions, blockers, and prior implementation details across development sessions. This skill searches Chronicle history and returns focused context for current work.

## Install

```bash
npx skillstore add chandlerhardy/chronicle-context-retriever
```

## Metadata

- Status: approved
- Slug: chandlerhardy-chronicle-context-retriever
- Skillstore revision: r1
- Version status: missing
- Tree hash: 9f19dd1fd79c2a4354d916826f8938c6181fb5b4efd9a2f6b45eef052ab0c717
- Author: ChandlerHardy
- GitHub username: ChandlerHardy
- License: MIT
- Repository: https://github.com/ChandlerHardy/chronicle/tree/main/chronicle-skills/chronicle-context-retriever
- Ref: 02f077c174c5335e2f5d02ca15e77b70d9543e58
- Supported tools: Claude, Codex, Claude Code
- Audit status: complete
- Agent install advisory: allowed
- Manual install advisory: allowed
- Artifact signature: available
- Audit attestation: unavailable
- Human verification: not\_verified
- Risk factors: external\_commands, filesystem
- Quality score: 78
- Quality tier: bronze
- Public page: https://skillstore.pages.dev/skills/chandlerhardy-chronicle-context-retriever
- Manifest: https://skillstore.pages.dev/api/skills/chandlerhardy-chronicle-context-retriever/manifest

## Capabilities

- Searches Chronicle sessions by topic, keyword, or user question.
- Retrieves detailed summaries for selected Chronicle session IDs.
- Filters session history by time period, repository, or AI tool when supported.
- Combines session and commit history into timeline-style context.
- Summarizes past decisions, blockers, outcomes, and relevance to current work.
- Uses Obsidian session notes when the user asks and tools are configured.

## Use Cases

- Resume Interrupted Feature Work: Recover prior implementation details, decisions, blockers, and related commits before continuing a feature.
- Review Past Technical Decisions: Find why a team chose an approach and what outcome followed in earlier sessions.
- Investigate Recurring Blockers: Search previous sessions for similar failures, migrations, integration problems, and known fixes.

## Prompt Templates

### Summarize Recent Work

```
Use Chronicle to summarize my work from yesterday. Include sessions, decisions, blockers, and related commits if available.
```

### Find Feature History

```
Search Chronicle for past work on [feature]. Return the most relevant sessions and explain what applies to my current task.
```

### Compare Prior Decisions

```
Find prior sessions about [topic] across the last [period]. Compare decisions, outcomes, and unresolved risks.
```

### Build Context Brief

```
Use broad then narrow Chronicle searches for [project or problem]. Produce a context brief with history, patterns, avoidances, and recommended next steps.
```

## Limitations

- Requires existing Chronicle data and a configured MCP server or Chronicle CLI.
- Cannot recover sessions that Chronicle did not record.
- Search quality depends on stored summaries, prompts, and query terms.
- May surface sensitive local development history that should be reviewed before sharing.

## Best Practices

- Start with a broad search, then narrow after reviewing likely sessions.
- Add dates, repositories, or tool filters when the request is vague.
- Review retrieved history for private details before sharing it outside the local environment.

## Anti Patterns

- Running many narrow searches before checking broad session context.
- Treating old decisions as current facts without checking the repository state.
- Sharing retrieved prompts, notes, or session summaries without privacy review.

## Security Audit

- Audited at: 2026-07-05T07:07:33.304\+00:00
- Summary: The static findings are false positives caused by Markdown backticks, command examples, and natural-language prompts in SKILL.md. I found no prompt injection, malware intent, data exfiltration instruction, path traversal behavior, or executable shell code in the skill content.

## Stats

- Views: 267
- Downloads: 9
- Favorites: 0
- Popularity score: 0