Sessions are the unit of work
By the end of this lesson you have a named session you closed on purpose and picked back up, and you can find any past conversation from a list instead of from memory. Naming is the single mechanic that makes a multi-terminal day survivable, and it costs one flag.
Yesterday's session is not gone. Claude Code keeps the whole conversation, including every file it touched, and you can walk back into it tomorrow morning as though you never left.
That sounds like a convenience. It is actually the foundation of everything in module 4, because once you are running four things at once, "which window was the invoice one" becomes the question that decides whether the day works.
Give it a name when you start it
Start with the session that already matters. The conversation from lesson 1 — the one that wrote card.html — is sitting there unnamed, because nothing had told you to name it yet. Go back to the first-day folder and pick that one up rather than starting something new:
Run this in first-day, before you start anything else there. It resumes the most recent session in that folder, which is lesson 1's.
claude --continueNow name it from inside, which works at any point in a session's life:
Typed at the prompt of that session. Lesson 1's conversation now has a name, and the rest of this lesson uses it.
/rename morning-triageFrom here on, name them at the start instead and you never have to come back and do this again:
-n is short for --name. Do this every time and the rest of the course gets easier.
claude -n morning-triageNames are how you find things later. An unnamed session is findable, but only by squinting at its first message in a list, which works fine with three sessions and not at all with fifteen.
One quirk worth knowing before it confuses you: if you try to take a name another live session is already using, the existing session keeps it and yours gets a variant, something like morning-triage-graceful-unicorn. Nothing is lost and nothing is overwritten. It just means the name you typed is not the name you got, so glance at it.
Coming back
Three ways, and the difference matters.
Short flag: -c. Picks up the most recent session in this folder, no questions asked.
claude --continueShort flag: -r. Opens a picker of every session, so you choose.
claude --resumeStraight back into the named one.
claude --resume morning-triageUse --continue when you know there is only one thing you were doing here. Use --resume with a name when you know exactly which. Use the bare picker when you have forgotten, which is most mornings.
The picker has more in it than it looks. Arrow keys move, → and ← open and close groups, Space previews a session without committing to it, and Ctrl+R renames one in place. Start typing to search. You can even paste a pull-request URL to find the session that produced it.
Two keys widen the search when what you want is not on screen: Ctrl+A shows every project on the machine, and Ctrl+W shows every worktree of the current repository. That second one will make more sense after module 3, and it is the reason a named session is worth the four extra characters.
What comes back, and what does not
A resumed session restores the whole conversation, the tool calls, the model it was using and the permission mode you had set.
It does not restore anything you passed on the command line that is not part of the conversation: extra directories added with --add-dir, custom settings files, or connected-tool configuration. Pass those again. Nothing warns you, and the symptom is a session that seems to have forgotten how to reach something it could reach yesterday.
The one real trap
If you resume the same session in two terminals without forking, messages from both interleave into one transcript.
Read that once more, because it is the single most confusing thing that can happen in a multi-terminal day. Two windows, one conversation, both of them writing into it. What you see is a session that appears to answer questions you did not ask, in an order that makes no sense.
If you genuinely want two lines of thought from the same starting point, branch instead:
Copies the conversation and moves this window onto the copy. The original is untouched.
/branch try-the-other-approachModule 3 gives you the proper tool for running two things at once on the same project. For now, the rule is simply: one session, one window.
Check it
- You resumed lesson 1's session with
claude --continueand named it with/rename - You exited it and came back with
claude --resume <name> - The conversation was still there, including what it did in lesson 1
- You opened the bare picker and previewed a session with
Spacewithout resuming it - You can explain what happens if the same session is open in two windows
If you see The picker is empty or missing the session I want
The picker defaults to the current project. Press Ctrl+A to widen it to every project on this machine. If it is still not there, you are in a different folder from the one you worked in, and --continue is scoped to the folder you are standing in.
What you just learned
claude -n <name>at startup, or/renamefrom inside a session you already have, and every session becomes findable later.--continueresumes the last session here;--resumeopens the picker;--resume <name>goes straight in.- The picker searches, previews with
Space, and widens to every project withCtrl+A. - A resumed session restores the conversation but not command-line options, so pass those again.
- Resuming one session in two windows interleaves both into one transcript. Branch instead.
practice
Open Claude Cowork on your own computer and try this on real files. Each module ends with a checkpoint where you submit what you made.
Open in ClaudeNext
Undo without fear