Claude Code resume: picking a session back up after a restart

Every Claude Code session is stored on disk as a conversation, keyed to the folder it ran in. Closing the terminal does not delete it. That means a reboot, a crash or an accidental Cmd+Q costs you nothing, as long as you resume instead of starting over.

The two flags

claude --continue reopens the most recent conversation for the current folder. claude --resume shows a picker of past conversations for that folder and lets you choose one.

In practice --continue is what you want nine times out of ten. Use --resume when you had several unrelated sessions in the same folder and need a specific one.

What comes back

The full message history, the files the agent read, the decisions it made and the plan it was following. What does not come back: running processes. A dev server the agent started is gone after a reboot and needs starting again.

Making it automatic

If you run several sessions, remembering which folder had which conversation is the hard part. adhdTerminal stores the session id with each tile, and on launch opens every tile with the matching conversation. The wall after a restart looks exactly like the wall before it.