AIChatExporter/FUTURE.md

Planned Future Work

Status 2026-08-18 (v0.9.0). The tool archives four providers — two web (chatgpt, claude) and two local agent-transcript (claude-code, codex) — on a schedule, on Linux and Windows, reporting results by push notification. Two items below are genuinely planned. Everything else has shipped or been decided against.

Completed work moves to the changelog; this file holds only what is not built yet. Decisions not to build something are recorded at the bottom in one line each, so they are not re-proposed — the full investigation trails behind them are in FUTURE-ARCHIVE.md.

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Roadmap

1. StartOS Service — one corpus, not per-machine islands

Each machine currently archives to its own exports/ and its own Joplin. Work is split across boxes — coding sessions (claude-code, codex) on the Linux machine, web chats (chatgpt, claude) on the Windows one — so there is no single place where all conversations exist together.

This was dropped on 2026-06-28 and reopened 2026-08-18, because the reasoning behind the drop has gone stale. It rested on "the source conversations live in the providers' clouds and can be re-downloaded". That is no longer true of half the providers: claude-code and codex transcripts exist only on the machine that produced them, Codex prunes its rollout files, and neither is recoverable from any cloud. The motivation is also different from the one weighed then — consolidation, not durability.

Intended split of responsibility (decided 2026-08-18). Each machine keeps running the exporter locally and keeps doing what only it can do: read that machine's local transcripts, and hold the browser session for the web providers. What changes is where the output goes. Instead of syncing to Joplin itself, a local run uploads its conversations to the StartOS storage area, and the StartOS service owns the Joplin connection for the whole corpus.

That inverts today's arrangement and removes two problems we already have:

• The Joplin-availability race leaves the clients. A scheduled run currently has to find Joplin desktop open on that same machine — the 09:02 timer run on 2026-08-18 exported fine and then skipped the sync because Joplin did not start until 09:07. A server that is always up has no such window, and --joplin-optional stops being load-bearing.
• One Joplin integration instead of N. Notebook naming, resource upload and note updates run once, server-side, against one manifest — rather than each machine independently deciding what a notebook is called and racing to update the same note.

What this needs, and what it does not:

• Not a headless web-provider login. The hard sub-problem the original drop retired stays retired: the web providers keep running interactively on the machine that has the browser, and push their output to the server. Only the local providers would run server-side, and they need no tokens at all.
• An upload step in the client — the counterpart of today's joplin command, pointed at the StartOS service instead of a local Joplin API. Probably a push alongside sync, so a scheduled client run stays one line.
• Per-machine identity in the corpus, which the exporter does not track today: claude_code.resolve_roots deliberately merges multiple roots with "no per-machine label". Centralizing makes that label load-bearing.
• Conflict handling for one conversation seen by two machines, and a decision about whether the server or the client owns the cache manifest. It is per-machine today, and that is what makes "already up to date" mean anything.
• A story for what the client keeps locally after a successful upload. Exports are the only copy of claude-code / codex transcripts once Codex prunes its rollouts, so the client should keep them rather than hand them off.

Meanwhile Joplin is sufficient — it already syncs (encrypted) offsite, and it is where the archive is actually read. This is a "nice eventually", not a gap.

2. Split the README into separate documents

The README is 830 lines / 5,562 words / 37 KB — about a 25-minute read, with 61 headings. An H2-only table of contents was added 2026-08-18 and helps, but it treats the symptom: the file is doing at least four unrelated jobs at once.

Rough shape of a split:

Document	Content today
README.md	What it is, install, first run, a pointer to the rest
docs/providers.md	ChatGPT Projects, Claude Code Sessions, Codex Sessions, session tokens
docs/cli.md	CLI Reference — ~250 lines on its own, the single biggest section
docs/scheduling.md	Scheduling a Daily Run, notifications
docs/troubleshooting.md	Troubleshooting, How the Cache Works

Not urgent, because it has a real cost the TOC did not: any existing link into a README section — a bookmark, a note, another repo, a commit message — breaks when that section moves to another file. Worth folding into the next substantial README edit rather than doing as a change of its own.

Two things to settle when it happens:

• .gitignore ignores *.md on purpose — exported conversations are Markdown and may contain private content — and re-includes each doc by name (!README.md, !FUTURE.md, …). New files under docs/ will be silently ignored, with no error, until !docs/*.md is added. This already bit the creation of FUTURE-ARCHIVE.md on 2026-08-18.
• Whether docs/ renders acceptably on the Gitea instance hosting this repo. Relative links between Markdown files do work there, but confirm before splitting rather than after.
• Whether anchors in the split files are stable enough to link between documents, or whether cross-references should point at file tops only. GFM anchors derive from heading text and break silently on a reword — the same fragility the TOC already carries.

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Decided against

Recorded so they are not re-proposed. Full reasoning and the recon behind each is in FUTURE-ARCHIVE.md.

Item	Verdict
Brave/Chromium cookie auto-extraction	Not viable (2026-06-12). App-Bound Encryption in Chrome 127+/current Brave needs admin + SYSTEM impersonation that AV flags as credential theft, and fails on Brave specifically. Auth stays manual via DevTools.
In-app watch/polling loop	Dropped (2026-06-28). Scheduling belongs to the host. Delivered instead in v0.9.0 as sync plus a systemd timer and a Windows scheduled task.
Proactive token-expiry notification	Blocked, and moot (2026-06-28). No trustworthy client-side expiry exists: the ChatGPT token is a JWE, Claude's is opaque, and /api/auth/session's expires is a rolling window that advances even for a dead token. doctor's error-based health check covers the real need.
Official export-ZIP fallback	Closed (2026-06-12). ChatGPT's official export omits project data, so it is not a real fallback here. BaseProvider still admits a FileProvider if that changes.
Joplin --force flag	Closed as not needed (2026-06-28).
Per-conversation cache reset	Closed as not needed (2026-06-28). Workaround: edit the manifest.
o1/o3 reasoning subpart reclassification	Closed (2026-06-28) — never seen in real captured data.
Obsidian vault output	Closed as not needed (2026-06-28). The Markdown is already Obsidian-valid; only file copying would be needed.
Search command	Closed as not needed (2026-06-28). grep/ripgrep over EXPORT_DIR covers it.
Claude attachments / files handling	Closed (2026-06-28) — never seen in real data; the drift canary will flag it if it appears.
Additional web providers (Gemini, Grok, Perplexity)	Out of scope — no significant usage to archive.

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Completed

Detail for each release is in CHANGELOG.md.

• v0.1.0 — Core export: ChatGPT + Claude, incremental sync, Markdown + JSON output
• v0.2.0 — Joplin import automation (joplin command, create/update notes, notebook auto-creation)
• v0.4.0 — Rich content: typed message blocks, ChatGPT voice transcripts, Custom Instructions extraction, data-loss visibility via LossReport and visible unknown blocks
• v0.5.0 — Nested Joplin notebooks, date-prefixed note titles, flat year folders
• v0.6.0 — Collapse tool retrieval dumps & hidden context (EXPORTER_HIDDEN_CONTENT); Claude Code session provider; prune + manifest integrity; binary content downloads; session limiter and request pacing; export --force
• v0.7.0 — canary drift detection; real ChatGPT token-health check on doctor; removal of the non-viable browser-cookie path
• v0.8.0 — Claude Code coverage reopened: subagent capture as folded <details>, repo [tags] in titles, its own AI-ClaudeCode notebook with self-healing note moves, multi-root scanning (CLAUDE_CODE_DIR, CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR)
• v0.9.0 — Codex CLI provider; launcher scripts removing the virtualenv ceremony on both platforms; sync with a meaningful exit code; daily scheduling for Linux and Windows; ntfy push notifications; ChatGPT project attribution via gizmo_id and the projects command; a silent data-loss fix in both local providers (splitlines breaking on U+0085/U+2028/U+2029)