Continuing a session
Pick up a conversation that already exists — one of your agent's own sessions, or a Happier session that went quiet — and decide who owns it afterwards.
Not every session starts in Happier. You began something in your terminal yesterday, or a Happier session went inactive overnight, and now you want to carry on. Happier can reach all of it — but how it reaches it changes what you can do afterwards, and that is the one distinction worth understanding before anything else.
Who owns the transcript
Every session in Happier is one of two kinds, shown as the Happier and Direct tabs in your session list:
| Happier session | Direct session | |
|---|---|---|
| Source of truth | Happier | The agent, on your machine |
| Visible across devices | Yes | Only while that machine is reachable |
| If the machine goes offline | Still readable | Unavailable until it returns |
| Transcript stored | In Happier, encrypted | Stays with the agent |
Both keep durable history — "direct" does not mean unsaved. It means the agent's own logs remain canonical and Happier is reading them rather than owning them.
Which kind new sessions start as is up to you: Settings → Session → Default session type.
Direct sessions are experimental. They also need the owning machine to stay reachable until you import them, which is the practical difference you will feel first.
Finding a session the agent already has
Happier can list the conversations that already exist on a connected machine, so you do not have to remember an identifier.
In the new-session flow, choose the AI backend and the machine, then open the input controls and look for Resume session. Where the agent supports listing, a Browse sessions button appears beside it — picking a session from that list fills the field for you.
The list is scoped to the agent and machine you already chose. For Codex it is
scoped further still, to the Codex home implied by your authentication choice,
so a connected-service account and your local ~/.codex show different
histories.
If listing is not available for that agent, you can paste the agent's own session identifier instead. Session Info shows it for sessions you already have.
Taking over a direct session
Opening someone's — or rather, your own — agent session directly lets you read and follow it. When you want to drive it from Happier, you take it over, and Happier asks how:
- Take over — control the session from Happier without importing the transcript. It stays a direct session, and the agent's logs stay canonical.
- Take over + import — bring the transcript into Happier and continue as a normal Happier session, synced across your devices.
There is a third option you will only see sometimes. When Happier finds a trusted local process still attached to that session, it offers Try to stop the local process first, confirmed with Stop and take over. That is the one to reach for when a terminal somewhere is still holding the conversation and your takeover would otherwise be fighting it.
Choosing between the first two is really a question about where you want the history to live afterwards. Import when you want the session on your phone tomorrow; keep it direct when the agent's own logs are the record you care about.
What controls are available
A direct session Happier is only following — rather than locally controlling — shows the transcript and history, including provider-backed side work, but leaves subagent launch, steering and stop unavailable. Happier hides controls it cannot honour rather than offering ones that would fail.
Once the session is locally controlled, the full surface returns: subagent launch, steering and send, stop and cancel.
An inactive Happier session is a different case again. If it is resumable and its machine is reachable, Happier can resume it first and then give you those controls.
When the machine is offline
For a direct session, the transcript cannot refresh, live following stops, and takeover waits until the machine reconnects.
For a Happier session, the transcript is already in Happier, so it stays readable and stays in your list.
What each agent supports
- Codex — browsing covers your normal Codex home plus supported connected-service homes, and Happier can follow Codex transcripts directly. See Codex.
- Claude — Happier can browse and open Claude sessions from the machine that owns them. Titles and transcript continuity depend on what the session logs expose. See Claude.
- OpenCode — server-backed sessions can be browsed directly, which is natural when the OpenCode server is already the source of truth. See OpenCode.
Which agents can resume their own sessions at all is in Agent capabilities.
Related
These are the neighbouring ideas people most often confuse with this one:
- Session handoff — moving a live session to another machine, keeping the same session id.
- Session forking — branching a conversation into a second one.
- Continue with another Agent — changing the engine without leaving the session.
- Resume inactive sessions — waking a Happier session that stopped.