What is SpecStory?
SpecStory is a suite of local-first extensions that automatically captures your AI coding sessions as reusable git-friendly markdown. While Git tracks what changed in your code, SpecStory helps capture why it changed, preserving the reasoning and decision-making that drove the intent behind every line. Never lose AI chat history.
❗️Important Note
By default, installing from the Visual Studio Marketplace directly will install SpecStory into VS Code. To instead install SpecStory into Cursor, you must install directly from inside the extensions panel in Cursor (see details on our documentation site).
✨ What the SpecStory extension does
📝 Automatic local capture
SpecStory automatically saves your AI conversations to .specstory/history/ (configurable in settings) in your project directory. So your prompts stay with your code.
Toggle auto-save on/off in settings to match your workflow.
☁️ SpecStory Cloud — your AI coding memory
SpecStory Cloud backs up every captured session to the cloud and unifies all your AI conversations from Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and more into one searchable place — browse, search, ask, and resume them from inside your editor.
Open it from the SpecStory control panel (Open SpecStory Cloud) or Command Palette → SpecStory: Open Cloud. Sign in, and the Cloud panel opens with five tabs:
- Overview — a per-project dashboard of sessions, exchanges, and sync size, plus a cross-project recent-activity feed. Toggle cloud sync for the current workspace on or off.
- Sessions — Search across every synced session with full-text and semantic search, filtered by project, agent, and time. Open any session to land on the matched passage.
- Ask — ask a question about your coding history and get a streaming answer with the exact sessions cited as evidence. (Pro)
- Skills — Skills generation: review, approve, install, and uninstall reusable skills mined from your synced sessions. Install globally or per-project, for the agents you choose. (Pro)
- Insights — a free client-aggregated view of how your agent work breaks down, plus a Pro analytics overview.
🔍 Search all your sessions
Full-text and semantic search across every synced session — filtered by project, agent, and time. Open any result to land right on the matched passage.
🔄 Resume anywhere
Reopen a past session in any supported agent — including picking up a Claude Code conversation in Cursor, or the other way around. Resume into the current Cursor window happens live through Cursor's native chat import (no restart); terminal agents resume through the specstory CLI in an integrated terminal. (Pro)
🚀 Quick Start
For VS Code/Cursor users:
- Sign up at cloud.specstory.com
- Open the SpecStory control panel in the sidebar and click Open SpecStory Cloud (or Command Palette →
SpecStory: Open Cloud)
For terminal-agent users (Claude Code, Codex CLI, etc.):
- Sign up at cloud.specstory.com
- Authenticate:
specstory login
- Sync your conversations:
specstory sync
✨ Why Cloud?
- Backup all your chats: every captured session syncs to the cloud automatically once enabled
- Search everywhere: full-text and semantic search across all your AI chats
- Ask and learn: get answers grounded in your own coding history, with citations
- Skills generation: turn repeated workflows into reusable, installable skills
- Resume anywhere: pick up a past session in any supported agent
- Privacy first: nothing syncs without your explicit permission
Full documentation →
💾 Selective saving
Use Command Palette (CMD/Ctrl-Shift-P) → SpecStory: Save AI Chat History to manually save specific conversations when auto-save is off.
🔗 Share conversations
Share your problem-solving process with teammates. Command Palette → SpecStory: Share AI Chat History creates anonymous shareable links to your conversations.
🎮 Control panel
Access the SpecStory panel to manage histories, configure settings, and monitor auto-save status. Find it in the sidebar or via View: Open View > SpecStory in the command palette.
🛠️ For Developers
Enable specstory.showDeveloperTools in VS Code settings to access:
- Debug logging in the SpecStory output channel
- Cursor sqlite DB explorer in your Primary Sidebar with:
- Search: Command Palette →
SpecStory (Developer Tools): Search VS Code State or click the magnifying glass icon
- Refresh: Command Palette →
SpecStory (Developer Tools): Refresh VS Code State or use the refresh button
- Copy values: Hover over any value and click the copy icon
- Find our docs chock full of use cases and a getting started guide to master your craft @ docs.specstory.com.
- Join our slack community to connect with other software composers!
🔮 Issue Reporting and Feature Requests
🔒 Privacy
SpecStory collects usage data to help improve the product. This can be disabled in the extension by unchecking SpecStory: Help Us Improve in your SpecStory extension settings.
This setting does not affect web analytics. For more information about what data we collect and how we use it, please see our privacy policy and data privacy docs which provide detail by feature.
