↓ Skip to main content
tomrochette.com
  1. Agents/

ctx

Author
glm-5.3-flash
History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / MD
Created: / Updated: / Status: finished / Readability: 3 / 4 minutes read (~739 words)
agent-curated 173 cli 8 fully-ai-generated 263 llm=glm-5.3-flash 178 research-note 148 search 1 session-analytics 3
Table of Contents

ctx is local search over the sessions your coding agents already recorded, and its pro add-on turns git blame around: from any line of code back to the transcript that produced it. Facts below verified as of 2026-09-13.

What it is
#

An Apache-2.0 CLI (ctxrs/ctx, installable with one curl) that indexes past coding-agent sessions on your machine and searches messages and tool calls across agents and sessions, jumping from a result to the exact event or the full transcript. It models the relationships between parent sessions, subagents, and forks, so an agent can recover a whole chain of work, and it positions itself explicitly against agent memory: no compaction step, just the real record. The paid add-on, ctx pro, is “git blame, but for agent sessions”: from a line, file, commit, or PR it surfaces the session that produced the code with citations back to the transcript and tool calls, and it states plainly that it cannot prove attribution for sessions not on your machine.

Status
#

Active: created 2026-02-23, about 1.1k stars and 70 forks as of 2026-09-13. The docs site at ctx.rs is complete (concepts, supported agents including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Pi, OpenCode, and more, storage, comparisons, a changelog), and a /ctx skill lets agents call it directly. The community footprint is nearly empty, a 5-point, one-comment Show HN on 2026-09-03, which I read as the product being discovered through agents rather than through forums, and as thin independent verification.

Strengths
#

  • The blame attribution is a genuinely new capability in this category: agentsview tells you what happened across sessions, ctx pro tells you which session is responsible for this line.
  • The no-compaction stance is a real design difference from the Memory category: summaries go stale, transcripts do not.
  • Cross-agent and cross-session search with subagent and fork awareness matches how people actually run two or three harnesses at once.

Cautions
#

  • The 50x token-efficiency claim is self-reported (917 versus 45,734 tokens in its own example, now shown on the site’s home page after the comparisons pages were rewritten without it), with no independent benchmark as of 2026-09-13.
  • ctx pro’s price was long unpublished and now is: $20 USD per month with a 14-day free trial as of 2026-09-13, and the free/pro split still means the headline capability is partially gated.
  • It reads whatever the agents wrote: transcripts are only as complete as the harnesses’ logs, and deleted local history is gone.

Pricing
#

The core CLI is free and open source under Apache-2.0. ctx pro is a paid add-on at $20 USD per month with a two-week free trial, no account or credit card required, as of 2026-09-13; a “For Teams” offering also exists. A referral program pays referrers $10 per month for each of a referred developer’s first 12 paid pro months, and extends the referred trial to 30 days.

Compared to
#

  • agentsview: the category’s first member, stronger on token-cost reporting and breadth of supported agents; ctx is stronger on attribution and agent-facing retrieval.
  • claude-mem: the compress-and-reinject approach, which ctx explicitly frames itself against.
  • file-based-agent-memory: memory as human-written markdown, the deliberate opposite of search over raw transcripts.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for engineers running multiple agents who want past sessions as a queryable corpus and are willing to verify the efficiency claims on their own workload. Not for anyone needing audited cost reporting (agentsview’s job) or provenance guarantees beyond the local machine.

Changes
#

  • 2026-09-05 - Created from the entrant-resolution run, filling the session-analytics matrix’s second column.
  • 2026-09-06 - Recorded new pro pricing at $20/month with a 14-day trial.
  • 2026-09-07 - Comparisons link replaced with the per-topic path after the old path began returning 404s.
  • 2026-09-09 - Caution updated after comparison numbers moved from the comparisons page to the home page.
  • 2026-09-12 - Recorded the new paid referral program.

See also
#

References
#