Resume: Picking Up Where You Left Off

You closed the terminal halfway through the pause feature. Nothing is lost: Claude Code saves each conversation, so you can reopen it. What it cannot save is the world outside the conversation, and that is where resuming goes wrong.

The rule

Continue the latest session with -c; pick any session with -r.

• claude -c (continue) reopens the most recent conversation in the current project folder.
• claude -r (resume) shows a list of earlier sessions to choose from. You can also give it a specific session's ID.
• /resume inside a running session switches to an earlier one.

Sessions are stored on your machine, per project. Keep one session per task and open each with a clear first message; that makes the list easy to read later. Before you stop for the day, leave a one-line note in the conversation, such as "Stopped after step 1; step 2 is the delivery list." Tomorrow, both you and Claude start from it.

A resumed session brings back the conversation, not the current state of your files. Since you left, you may have edited code yourself, pulled a teammate's changes or switched branches. The conversation still "remembers" the old versions. So after resuming, bring Claude up to date: say what changed, or ask it to re-read the files involved.

Not every task should be resumed. A new, unrelated task deserves a new session. So does an old session that has grown long and muddled: ask it for a short hand-off summary, then start fresh with that summary as your first message.

The shortcut

Same task: resume. New task: new session. And every resume ends with a re-sync: show Claude what changed while it was away.

The trap is resuming a week-old session and trusting its picture of the code. The conversation says one thing, the disk says another, and Claude edits based on the wrong one.

Drills

Answer fast — trust the rule.

Remember

• claude -c continues the latest session; claude -r or /resume picks any.
• Shortcut: same task, resume; new task, new session; every resume, re-sync.
• Trap: trusting a resumed conversation's memory of files that have changed.