---
title: Session Files & Links (what this session made)
---

# Session Files & Links (what this session made)

## What it is

**What it is:** a read-only, per-session list of **every file the agent created or edited** in that
conversation and **every link it handed you** — newest first, one row per file or link, each one
clickable. It answers "the agent made me a thing twenty minutes ago and I've scrolled past it —
where is it?"

**Where it lives:** a **Files** button in the session header, sitting with Read Aloud and Archive at
the top right. Click it (or press **Ctrl+Shift+O**) and the panel opens under the button. It appears
on desktop **and on your phone**, which is deliberate — see _Why mobile matters_ below.

## Where to find it

### Availability

Off by default. Turn it on in **Settings → Labs** (search for "files and links"); the button and the
keyboard shortcut both stay hidden and inert until you do.

## How it behaves

### What each half shows

**Files** — every path the agent wrote or edited, deduplicated, newest first. A file edited five
times is one row, stamped with the last time it was touched and a quiet "edited 5 times". Clicking a
row opens the file exactly as clicking that path in the chat does, so the same project-scope
permission check applies; nothing new was invented to open files.

**Links** — every link the agent **presented to you**: a proper labelled link, or a link it put on a
line of its own. A URL mentioned in passing inside a shell command is deliberately **not** a link.
That rule is measured, not stylistic: on a real session the permissive "any URL" reading produced
**357 rows**, nearly all of them internal API addresses typed inside `curl` commands, against **2**
genuine artifacts. Ignoring code blocks alone did not fix it (357 → 355), because agents write
endpoints in ordinary prose. Counting only presented links reduced five real sessions to 1, 2, 1, 1
and 3 rows — each a real share link or deployed page.

### Why mobile matters

On a phone there is no file explorer at all — the file tree is a desktop-only sidebar. Until this
panel, a link in the chat was the *only* route to something a session had produced, which is exactly
what the feature request that prompted this described. So the Files button is a real header button
rather than a "pin it to the session bar" item: pinned bar commands are switched off on mobile by
design.

### What it does NOT capture

**Files created by a shell command are not listed.** The list is built from the agent's own
file-writing tool calls, which record a filename. A file produced by a redirect inside a `Bash`
command (`cat > notes.txt`, `cp`, `tee`, a heredoc) records no filename and cannot be picked up. The
panel says so on screen rather than presenting a partial list as complete — worth knowing, because
in this codebase's own sessions `Bash` calls outnumber file-writing calls by roughly five to one.

**A session whose transcript has rotated** (a very long conversation that compacted) shows files
from its current transcript only. Links are unaffected — they come from saved messages.

**A session run on a non-Claude engine** has no transcript to read, so it shows links only, and says
so plainly instead of rendering an empty file list that would read as "nothing was created".

## For agents

### How it works

Nothing is stored. There is no table, no migration and no background tracker — the list is worked
out on demand each time you open the panel, from two sources the app already keeps: the session's
CLI transcript (for files) and its saved messages (for links). That means it can never drift out of
sync with what actually happened, and it added no data to your database.

Both halves are independent: if the transcript can't be read you still get links, and if the message
store hiccups you still get files. Any managed secret sitting in a path or a URL is scrubbed before
the list leaves the main process.

## Related

This panel has no direct sibling in the library yet, so start from [INDEX.md](INDEX.md), the library index, to find the pages covering sessions, their header controls and the Labs switches.