Claude Code's CLI is powerful, but it has a blind spot: once a session ends, there's no built-in way to review what happened, compare how your code changed, or debug a sequence of edits. CCheckpoints, a new open-source tool, fills that gap with automatic session tracking and a visual diff viewer.
The tool works by hooking into Claude Code's existing hook system. It listens for two events: when you send a message (userPromptSubmit) and when a session ends (stop). A lightweight background server on port 9271 receives this data and stores everything in a local SQLite database. No data leaves your machine.
The standout feature is a browser-based dashboard that displays a timeline of your sessions with side-by-side diff comparisons between checkpoints. Think of it as git history, but at the granularity of individual Claude Code interactions rather than commits.
Setup and Storage
Installation is a standard npm install, after which a setup command registers the hooks in Claude Code's configuration. Session data lands in %APPDATA%/CCheckpoints/ on Windows or ~/.ccheckpoints/ on Mac and Linux.
The concept is directly inspired by Cursor IDE's checkpoint feature, which lets you step backward through AI-assisted edits. CCheckpoints brings the same idea to the terminal. For developers who run long Claude Code sessions with dozens of prompts, having a searchable record of every interaction and its resulting code changes is genuinely useful for understanding what worked and what didn't.
The project is MIT-licensed and built with TypeScript and Node.js.