Coding Agents: Capturing Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, and Cursor Sessions

Learn how Meridian ingests coding-agent transcripts from Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor as first-class sessions, how supervised and autonomous agent time is measured, and how agent work flows into ticket classification and worklog drafts.

Meridian treats coding-agent sessions as first-class activity, alongside the screen-based sessions captured by screenpipe. Each agent’s conversation store on disk is segmented into rows in the same app_sessions table, summarised on-device, classified against your tickets, and folded into the same per-task totals you see on the dashboard. The result is that “an agent shipped this while you were at lunch” is visible, attributed to a ticket, and quoted in your worklog draft — without you doing anything.

When this applies

This pipeline is dormant unless a supported coding agent is present on the machine. Meridian probes for each agent’s on-disk store and CLI at daemon startup. If none of those exist, the indexer and summariser stay idle and log “dormant” — installing Meridian on a machine without any of these agents has no effect until you add one.

Supported agents

Meridian ingests conversations from the following agents, each through a dedicated source adapter that normalises its native on-disk format into the same internal record shape. Everything downstream of the adapter — segmentation, sealing, summarising, classification — is agent-blind.

Agent	app_name written	Source store	Captured how
Claude Code	Claude Code	~/.claude/projects/<project>/<uuid>.jsonl	SessionEnd hook (zero-latency) + daemon fallback poll
Codex	Codex	~/.codex/sessions/<uuid>.jsonl	Daemon fallback poll
GitHub Copilot CLI	GitHub Copilot	~/.copilot/session-state/<uuid>/events.jsonl	Daemon source-adapter sweep
GitHub Copilot Chat (VS Code)	GitHub Copilot	VS Code workspace and global chat session op-logs	Daemon source-adapter sweep
Cursor (IDE sidebar agent)	Cursor Agent	state.vscdb (cursorDiskKV table)	Daemon source-adapter sweep
Cursor Agent CLI (cursor-agent)	Cursor Agent	~/.cursor/chats/<workspace>/<chat-uuid>/store.db	Daemon source-adapter sweep
Antigravity	—	(detection-only stub)	Logged once at startup; awaiting a pinned store format

The shape of each row in app_sessions is the same across every agent. You can filter to coding-agent rows with claude_session_uuid IS NOT NULL (the column name is historical — it carries the session UUID for every agent, not just Claude).

What gets captured

Each session becomes one or more segments, where each segment is a row in app_sessions with the following distinguishing fields:

Field	Value for a coding-agent row
app_name	Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, or Antigravity Agent.
claude_session_uuid	The agent session UUID — the idempotency key, alongside segment_started_at.
session_text_source	Which store the transcript came from (e.g. claude_jsonl, copilot_events_jsonl, cursor_vscdb, cursor_cli_store).
started_at / ended_at	First and last turn timestamp in the segment, ISO 8601 UTC.
frame_count	Number of turns in the segment (not screenpipe frames).
session_text	The transcript body — user prompts and assistant turns.
window_titles	The agent’s own session name when it has one (Cursor composerData.name, Copilot Chat customTitle, Claude Code summary, cursor-agent meta name). Rendered exactly like screen-capture window titles.
session_summary	Factual prose summary written by the summariser.
summary_source	claude, codex, copilot, cursor_agent, or mlx (which engine produced the summary).
task_method	Pipeline state — see The lifecycle below.
task_key	The ticket the segment was classified to, once classified.

Coding-agent rows live in the same table as screen sessions, so every existing query, every MCP tool, and the dashboard timeline all see them automatically. See Sessions for the rest of the schema.

Session names

Most agents name their sessions — automatically after the first exchange, or via a custom title the user sets — and Meridian writes that name into window_titles using the canonical [{"window_name": "...", "count": 1}] shape. The dashboard session list and the classifier read coding-agent rows exactly like screen-capture rows as a result. Agents that do not name their sessions (Codex, Copilot CLI) store an empty window_titles array; placeholders like Cursor’s New Agent are filtered out.

A name that appears after the first exchange (Cursor names a chat once a reply arrives) refreshes the live row; sealed rows stay immutable.

Segmenting a long transcript

A single transcript can run for hours, so Meridian splits it into segments using two rules:

• An idle gap longer than one hour between turns opens a new segment.
• A one-hour time-box caps each segment, but the cut only happens at the next real user prompt — so a segment always ends on a complete assistant turn and the next one opens on a user message.

The (claude_session_uuid, segment_started_at) pair is the unique key. Re-running the indexer on the same store produces the same rows; there is no DELETE-then-INSERT.

The SessionEnd hook

Claude Code supports a SessionEnd hook that fires the instant a session closes. Meridian’s installer registers one entry into ~/.claude/settings.json that invokes the meridian coding-agent-hook subcommand with the transcript path on stdin. The hook seals exactly one session, exits in under 100 ms, and always returns 0 — a misbehaving hook can never block Claude.

The installer merges into your existing settings.json. Other hooks you have configured are left untouched, and re-running the installer is idempotent: the existing Meridian entry is replaced, nothing else is touched.

# Install or refresh the SessionEnd hook
./services/scripts/install-claude-hook.sh

# Remove only Meridian's entry, leaving other hooks intact
./services/scripts/uninstall-claude-hook.sh

./install.sh runs this for you on a fresh setup. The other agents (Codex, Copilot, Cursor) have no equivalent hook, so their sessions are caught by the daemon’s source-adapter sweep on the next indexer tick.

The hook is the 99% happy path for Claude Code. The in-daemon indexer is the backstop for everything else — it seals settled rows that the hook missed (Claude crashes, force-quit, machine sleep), polls the other agents’ stores, and re-parses changed conversations to refresh the live tail of any in-flight session.

The lifecycle

Each coding-agent row walks one column — task_method — through its life. You can query the column directly to see where a session is in the pipeline.

coding_agent_live ──seal──▶ pending_summariser ──summarise──▶ pending_classifier ──classify──▶ mlx_direct

task_method	Meaning
coding_agent_live	Segment is still growing. Re-upserted on every indexer tick.
pending_summariser	Segment is sealed (sealed_at is set) and immutable. Queued for the summariser.
pending_classifier	Summary is written. Queued for the classifier.
mlx_direct	Classified on its summary, task_key is set. Terminal.
subprocess_error	Row failed the summariser three times (e.g. transcript exceeds every engine’s context window). Dead-lettered and permanently skipped — no further work or LLM calls are spent on it.

Per-agent summarisation

The summariser routes each session to the engine that knows the agent best, with the on-device MLX server as the shared fallback when every primary engine fails or is rate-limited:

Session source	Primary engine	Fallback
Claude Code	claude -p /session-summary (your Claude subscription)	MLX /summarise
Codex	codex exec	MLX /summarise
GitHub Copilot (CLI or VS Code)	copilot -p	MLX /summarise
Cursor (sidebar or CLI)	cursor-agent -p	MLX /summarise
Anything else	claude -p	MLX /summarise

All engines target the same schema, so downstream consumers cannot tell which engine produced a given summary except by reading summary_source. A primary engine that is rate-limited short-circuits to MLX immediately; if both the primary and MLX are down, the row is left pending and retried on the next sweep.

The session-summary skill

The Claude engine invokes claude -p /session-summary, which expects a Claude Code command file at ~/.claude/commands/session-summary.md. Without it, every Claude Code session silently falls back to MLX — you lose the higher-quality, subscription-priced summary for no visible reason.

Install or repair the skill file with:

meridian coding-agent-install-skill

The command is idempotent and safe to re-run. meridian doctor checks for the file at startup and warns when it is missing; meridian doctor --fix auto-installs it.

Supervised vs autonomous agent time

A coding-agent session can overlap with your own foreground screen time (you were watching Claude work in another pane) or run entirely while you were away from the keyboard (the agent kept going during lunch). Meridian splits the agent’s wall-clock time into two slices so the dashboard can label each one honestly:

• Supervised agent time — the intersection of agent intervals with your active foreground presence. This is AI-assisted work you were doing.
• Autonomous agent time — the agent intervals that ran while you were not present (no foreground session, or a user_idle gap). This is the slice that lifts a task above your hands-on hours.

The split is computed from intervals, not summed totals, so overlap is never double-counted. The dashboard renders agent activity as an overlay band on top of your presence timeline — never additive to focus time — and per-task totals are shown as your_time + autonomous_agent_time, with autonomous time labelled + Xm agent while you were away.

-- All coding-agent rows for a ticket today, across every agent
SELECT
  app_name,
  started_at,
  ended_at,
  duration_s,
  summary_source,
  substr(session_summary, 1, 120) AS summary_preview
FROM app_sessions
WHERE task_key = 'KAN-108'
  AND claude_session_uuid IS NOT NULL
  AND started_at >= date('now')
ORDER BY started_at;

Role in the worklog pipeline

The worklog ledger reads the same app_sessions rows but treats coding-agent segments specially:

• An unsettled coding-agent row (task_method in coding_agent_live, pending_summariser, or pending_classifier) blocks its hour from being drafted, so the worklog never quotes a transcript that hasn’t been summarised and classified yet.
• A settled row (mlx_direct with a task_key) contributes its session_summary as evidence to the worklog draft for that ticket.
• A dead-lettered row (subprocess_error) is skipped, so a single oversized transcript never blocks the rest of the hour.

This is why the summary is written before classification — the classifier reasons over the summary (cheaper, sharper) and the worklog quotes the summary verbatim. A raw 50,000-token transcript is never sent to your PM tool.

Configuring and operating

Most users do not need to touch the pipeline. If you do:

# Install the Claude Code session-summary skill (idempotent)
meridian coding-agent-install-skill

# Seal one session by hand from a SessionEnd-style payload
echo '{"transcript_path":"/Users/you/.claude/projects/foo/<uuid>.jsonl"}' \
  | meridian coding-agent-hook

# Summarise the pending queue for a specific day (manual backfill)
meridian coding-agent-summarise --day 2026-05-30

# Classify every summarised row that is still pending
meridian coding-agent-classify

The daemon’s automatic summariser drain covers all pending days, with a per-row attempt cap so a transcript that exceeds every engine’s context window is dead-lettered after three failures instead of looping forever. Use --day <YYYY-MM-DD> against coding-agent-summarise to backfill a specific day on demand.

meridian doctor reports the state of every supported agent — which CLIs are on PATH, which stores exist, whether cursor-agent needs cursor-agent login, and whether the session-summary skill is installed — and meridian doctor --fix resolves the auto-fixable findings.

Logs for the in-daemon indexer and summariser live alongside the rest of Meridian’s logs. Tail them with meridian logs coding-agent-indexer and meridian logs daemon to watch the pipeline in real time.

Privacy

Coding-agent transcripts are read from your own local stores (~/.claude, ~/.codex, ~/.copilot, ~/.cursor, and the relevant VS Code storage directories). Summaries are generated either by your local agent CLI (using your existing subscription) or by the on-device MLX server. The transcript itself is never sent to any remote service by Meridian — only the ticket update you have configured (Jira, GitHub, or Linear) leaves your machine, and only after the row has been classified and the worklog ledger decides to draft.

Next steps

Sessions

The shared app_sessions schema that coding-agent rows live in.

Task Classification

How sessions — including coding-agent segments — get linked to a Jira, GitHub, or Linear ticket.

CLI Reference

Full reference for meridian coding-agent-hook, coding-agent-install-skill, coding-agent-summarise, and related subcommands.

Dashboard

Where supervised and autonomous agent time appear on the timeline and per-task views.