April 21, 2026
Context custody battle
Show HN: Ctx – a /resume that works across Claude Code and Codex
New tool promises one chat to rule your AIs; commenters argue: genius or just file a PR
TLDR: Ctx is a local app that lets developers resume, branch, and search the same AI coding chat across Claude Code and Codex. Commenters split: skeptics say it’s redundant and limited by cross‑model quirks, while others cheer local‑first control and ask for export/import and smarter cross‑provider handling.
Show HN just dropped Ctx, a local tool that keeps your AI chat history glued together across Anthropic’s Claude Code and a Codex setup. Think “save my place” for coding chats: resume, branch, search, and stay on the exact conversation. No cloud keys, just SQLite and files, with a simple web UI. The pitch: no transcript drift, safe branching, and curated loads to pin or exclude messages. But the crowd instantly split. One side’s all-in on local‑first freedom and privacy; the other wonders if this is reinventing the wheel instead of improving existing tools.
Skeptics fired first: buremba grilled the value—“how is this better than just dropping a PR?”—and flagged that prompt caching (speed-ups from reused prompts) doesn’t travel between models. Power users piled on with feature asks: t0mas88 wants export/import to share context; ghm2180 asked how Ctx juggles token limits and normalizes tool calls across providers. Meanwhile, giancarlostoro vented about fragmented setups and “memories” that don’t sync across devices, dreaming of one harness to rule them all. The memes wrote themselves: “context custody battle,” “AI divorce counselor,” and “one chat to bind them.” Will Ctx be the peacemaker or just another tool to babysit? Repo.
Key Points
- •Ctx is a local context manager that binds sessions to exact Claude Code and Codex conversations to prevent transcript drift.
- •It supports safe branching of workstreams, indexed retrieval, and curated loads (pin, exclude, delete) for managing context.
- •A browser frontend (ctx web --open) enables browsing workstreams, searching context, viewing details, and copying continuation commands.
- •Users can start, resume, and branch workstreams via commands in Claude Code (/ctx ...) or Codex/terminal (ctx ...).
- •Multiple installation options are provided: project-local setup, global install via setup.sh or curl script (with flags), and a skills.sh bootstrap path.