pi

pi saves JSONL sessions in folders named after the working directory. Hansard supports the five session formats pi has used, from its early linear files to the tree format of versions 2 and 3.

Source IDs

Source	Use it for
pi	pi coding agent sessions and their branch history.

How the import works

Hansard scans pi’s JSONL sessions, which are grouped by an encoded working directory. Linear sessions replay in their saved order. For tree sessions, Hansard starts at the last entry in the file and follows each entry’s parent back to the start, which is the branch pi resumes. User and assistant messages, reasoning, tool calls and results, model changes, compactions, token usage, and cost become the conversation. The working directory sets the project.

pi 1.1.0 keeps session version 3 and adds explicit system messages, standalone usage, and context edits. Hansard preserves those records with their types. Context edits describe changes to model input and do not erase the original archived messages. System sections retain explicit clears and tool definitions. Summary usage stays separate from reply-model attribution when no model was recorded.

Entries on abandoned branches stay in the archive’s exact copy of the file, but they do not appear in the conversation or its details. Hansard rejects files it cannot identify, files that mix formats, damaged files, files that change while being read, and files over the size limit, instead of guessing the closest format. Importing again updates a session with the same ID. Fields that an older pi version never wrote stay empty rather than being estimated.

Import and keep current

Import now

hansard import --source pi --since all
hansard index rebuild

Keep current

With Automatic source selection, the watcher already includes pi. With a Custom list, enable it. The watcher picks it up within 30 seconds:

hansard config sources enable pi

Review the import in the app

1. When the import finishes, open Sessions and selectFilter & sort.
2. Set Source to pi and setTime to the window you imported. UseFolder to narrow the list when you use this harness in several projects.
3. Select a conversation to check its messages, tool calls, files, commits, model, and token usage.

To keep archiving new sessions from a local harness, openSettings → Imports. Automaticfollows every supported harness installed on this computer.Custom lets you turn individual harnesses on or off. Cloud sources turn on separately under Cloud agents, and ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini, and Gemini Notebook / NotebookLM exports import withImport export…. Each also has its own import command. If a conversation you expect is missing after you reset the filters, run the import command on this page again with --explain-skips where the source supports it.

What Hansard preserves

• User and assistant messages, reasoning, and tool calls and results.
• The branch pi resumes, compaction records, model changes, input and output tokens, and pi’s estimated cost calculated from configured model rates.
• Recorded response models separately from requested models and model selections.
• Explicit zero counters separately from missing token and cost fields.
• The working directory from the session’s folder name.
• An exact copy of each JSONL file next to the conversation.

Known limitations

• Hansard imports only records that belong to a valid pi session tree.
• oh-my-pi, a fork of pi, uses a different format and is not supported.
• Fields that older pi formats did not record stay empty. Hansard does not fill them in from later releases.
• Reasoning effort follows recorded configuration only for a matching request model. A reply with a different model or provider clears the earlier effort. pi can omit configuration changes when resuming through the CLI; an unrecorded effort change for the same model cannot be detected from the session file.
• Native validation covers pi 0.73.1 with a local synthetic endpoint, resumed turns, successful and failed edits, a failed shell command, an image result, repeated import, and offline raw rebuild. Hosted accounting, extensions, forks, compaction, and full viewer acceptance remain unverified.
• A separate upstream audit covers pi 1.1.0 with synthetic regressions. No local 1.1.0 store was available for native acceptance.

Refresh an existing archive

hansard import --source pi --since all
hansard index rebuild

The current parser separates response models from selections, marks calculated costs as estimates, preserves zero counters, and counts successful native edit pairs. Sessions archived by an earlier parser need a reimport to refresh these fields. If the original JSONL is unavailable, rebuild from its verified preserved copy:

hansard rebuild --from-raw --provider pi --since all