When to Use

•When needing to understand what happened over a period
•When documenting the evolution of a feature
•When creating a decision trail

Input

Time range (flexible):

•last week / this week
•last month / January / 2026-01
•2026-01-20 to 2026-01-27
•recent (last 7 days)

Or topic/feature-based:

•auth (sessions mentioning authentication)
•refactor (sessions tagged as refactor)
•how we built caching (feature narrative across sessions)

Summary Types

Timeline summary (default): What happened in a period Feature narrative: "How we built X" from multiple sessions Decision trail: Link decisions to the sessions that made them Approach synthesis: "What have I tried for X?" — across sessions:

•What approaches were tried?
•What worked / what failed?
•Recurring patterns?
•Current state?

Process

•Find matching journal entries:

bash

ls .context/journal/*.md | grep "2026-01"

•
Read each entry - understand what was worked on, accomplished, decided
•
Generate summary with structure:

markdown

# Summary: [Period]

## Overview
[2-3 sentences: focus and accomplishments]

## Work Completed
- **[Feature]**: Description

## Decisions Made
- [Decision]: [Rationale]

## Learnings
- [Learning]: [Why it matters]

## Sessions
| Date | Session | Summary |
|------|---------|---------|
| 01-24 | twinkly-stirring-kettle | Code cleanup |

•
Review with user - ask about focus, omissions, filename
•
Write to .context/journal/summary-[period].md