Resume AI Agent Sessions Across Devices

AI agent session resume is not just a convenience feature. It is how a useful Claude Code or Codex run survives the normal shape of development: you start at a desk, step away, check from a phone, return later, and still need to understand what happened.

The hard part is not sending one more prompt. The hard part is preserving enough context to make a good next decision:

• What task was the agent working on?
• Which machine and repository owned the run?
• What files changed?
• Which commands ran?
• Did the agent need approval?
• Is the session active, complete, archived, or worth reopening?

Junction is designed around that continuity. The daemon runs on your machine, agents execute where your code already lives, and the browser or mobile app becomes the control surface. The goal is not to move your development environment into a cloud sandbox. The goal is to make the local session visible and controllable across devices.

What Session Resume Really Means

For agent work, "resume" can mean several different things.

Those are different from a generic chat history. A developer does not only need the words. They need the run state around the words.

For example, if you check a Codex run from your phone and see that it finished a small test update, you may not need to continue the conversation. You need the diff and verification output. If you see that Claude Code stopped after a failed command, you need the command, the failure, and the current branch before asking it to continue.

Why Local-First Resume Is Different

Claude Code and Codex both have local workflows. Anthropic's Claude Code Remote Control docs describe a local session that can be continued from a phone, tablet, or browser while execution stays on the user's machine. OpenAI's Codex CLI docs describe a local terminal agent that can read, change, and run code in the selected directory.

Junction's position is similar in the most important way: your code stays where it already lives. The daemon is local. The agent process is local. The browser or phone is the control surface.

That matters for resume because the session is tied to real development context:

• the repository path,
• the daemon machine,
• the branch or worktree,
• the terminal and file state,
• the agent transcript,
• the Git diff.

If you lose that context, "continue" becomes risky. The agent might continue from stale assumptions, you might review the wrong diff, or a branch might sit open because no one remembers what it was supposed to do.

A Practical Resume Workflow

Use a three-stage workflow: active, review, archive.

Active

While the agent is running, Junction gives you live context: output streaming, approvals, stop controls, notifications, Git state, and session status. From a phone, the goal is to make lightweight decisions:

• approve a safe command,
• deny or question a risky action,
• stop a drifting run,
• check whether the agent is still making progress,
• decide whether the final review can wait.

You do not need to read every line. You need to preserve enough momentum that the run does not sit blocked in a terminal you cannot reach.

Review

When the agent finishes, the question changes from "what is happening?" to "is this worth keeping?"

Review the transcript, changed files, commands, and final summary. Compare the result to the original task. If the run created a branch or worktree, decide whether it should become a pull request, receive another prompt, or be abandoned.

This is where session continuity saves time. You should not have to reconstruct the run from terminal scrollback and memory.

Archive

Not every session needs to stay open. The Free plan includes two active or open chats, and Core expands that to unlimited open chats. Archiving keeps old work from crowding active work while preserving the history you may need later.

An archived session is not the same as a lost session. It is a closed chapter that remains inspectable.

Example: Phone to Desktop Handoff

Imagine a focused bug fix:

Fix the failing checkout summary test.
Scope: checkout summary component and focused test only.
Verification: run the focused test before summarizing.
Stop if shared pricing or auth code appears involved.

You start the run at your desk. Ten minutes later, you leave for lunch. Junction sends a notification that the agent needs approval to run the focused test. From your phone, you inspect the output and approve because the command matches the prompt.

Later, the run completes. You do not merge from the phone. You check the summary, confirm the diff is small, and leave it for desktop review. When you return, you open the same session, inspect the transcript and Git diff, run any remaining verification, and open a pull request if the branch is clean.

That is the point of cross-device resume: not to make every review mobile, but to keep the run understandable until the right device is available.

What To Preserve Before Resuming

Before sending a continuation prompt, check:

• Current branch or worktree.
• Last user request.
• Last assistant summary.
• Last failed or successful command.
• Files changed since the run began.
• Pending approval or stopped state.
• Whether the run is active or archived.

Then write a continuation prompt that names the current state:

Continue from the failed checkout summary test.
The last command failed because the expected total did not include the discount row.
Inspect the existing diff before editing.
Keep the change inside checkout summary and its focused test.

That is stronger than "continue." It tells the agent what you know and what boundary still applies.

Tradeoffs

Session resume can make bad work easier to continue. That is the risk.

If a session has accumulated wrong assumptions, repeated failed attempts, or unrelated edits, resuming may be worse than starting fresh. Claude Code's best-practices guidance notes that repeated corrections can clutter context and that stopping or rewinding can be useful when a session has gone off track. The same principle applies to any local agent workflow: continuity is useful only when the session still contains useful context.

Use this rule:

• Resume when the branch is coherent and the transcript still helps.
• Restart when the context is polluted or the diff no longer matches the task.
• Archive when the work is complete or not worth keeping active.

Where Junction Fits

Junction gives session continuity a product surface. Instead of treating each terminal as a separate memory island, it connects local daemon sessions to a browser and mobile app that can show active work, archived history, output, approvals, Git state, and review context.

Start with the Junction setup guide to pair one daemon. If you routinely keep more than two active chats open or supervise multiple machines, compare the current plan limits on pricing.