Inspecting History

One of agit’s superpowers is acting as a time machine for your AI agent’s actions. These commands allow you to look back, inspect details, and figure out exactly what happened, step by step.

agit status

The ‘Why’ Just like git status, you need a quick overview of what’s currently happening in your repository. agit status acts as your investigation dashboard, giving you a top-level summary of your recorded agent history.

The ‘How’ To get a bird’s-eye view, run:

agit status

Use this when you want to see if agit is currently tracking active sessions and get a quick pulse on your repository’s state.

agit timeline

The ‘Why’ When an agent completes a complex task, you might want to review its exact chain of thought. agit timeline shows you all recently recorded steps across all sessions in reverse chronological order. It’s the ultimate audit log for your AI’s activity.

The ‘How’ Run:

agit timeline

This is particularly useful when you return to a project after a coffee break and want to see what your background agent was up to while you were away.

agit sessions

The ‘Why’ Agents perform work in distinct “sessions” (like a conversation thread). Over time, your .agit store will accumulate many sessions. This command lists them all, helping you identify specific tasks or conversations.

The ‘How’ Run:

agit sessions

This outputs a clean list of all recorded sessions, allowing you to grab a specific session ID to use with commands like agit log or agit diff.

agit log

The ‘Why’ If agit timeline is a global view, agit log is a focused view. It shows you the specific step history for a single session, making it easy to follow the narrative of one specific task from start to finish.

The ‘How’ To view the most recent session’s log:

agit log

To view a specific session (grab the ID from agit sessions):

agit log <SESSION_ID>

agit show

The ‘Why’ Every step an agent takes is recorded with a unique BLAKE3 hash. When you need to drill down into the absolute minutiae of a single step—what tools were used, what files were changed, what the exact prompt was—agit show is your magnifying glass.

The ‘How’ Pass the step’s hash to see the details:

agit show abc123def

You can also use flags like --files or --stat to see a summary of the file changes that happened during this exact step.

agit diff

The ‘Why’ Seeing that a file changed is good, but seeing how it changed is better. agit diff lets you render a standard diff for a specific step, between two steps, or even across an entire session.

The ‘How’ To see what changed in a specific step compared to its parent:

agit diff abc123def

To see what changed across an entire session:

agit diff --session <SESSION_ID>

agit between

The ‘Why’ Sometimes you’re tracking down a bug, and you know it was introduced between two specific Git commits. agit between correlates Git history with agit history, showing you all the agent steps that occurred between two Git revisions.

The ‘How’ Provide the Git commit ranges:

# Show all agent steps after a specific commit
agit between abc123def

# Show agent steps between two specific commits
agit between abc123def fed321cba

agit cat

The ‘Why’ For the true power users! agit cat prints the raw, unformatted object content from the .agit store based on its BLAKE3 hash. It’s an essential tool for debugging the store itself or writing custom scripts that parse raw agit data.

The ‘How’

agit cat abc123def

Use this when you need to bypass the pretty-printing of agit show and get straight to the raw JSON bytes.