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Launch HN: Skillsync (YC W26) – AI chat sessions made portable across agents

cat-whisperer · 68 points · 62 comments · 17 de set.

Hey HN, we're Nars & Nishant, founders of Skillsync (https://skillsync.com) Skillsync lets you move your AI chats across every coding agent. Most of our work exists as conversations, which are currently scattered across our agents. Though stored locally, these conversations use different formats. This is annoying because you cannot simply switch between agents without starting over. We get locked into a single provider and their agent as we invest in skills and memories over time. Skillsync acts as a universal converter. It moves the entire session, including all the messages, reasoning and tool calls so you can pick up right where you left off. Skillsync collects all your sessions in one place and makes them searchable. It breaks down what each session is carrying, including which loaded skills the agent is actually using, making stale context easy to spot. You can also create shared workspaces to sync sessions across your team. You can build your own closed loop systems. Everything runs locally except when you share to workspaces. The core is an open-source Rust engine called txcript (https://github.com/skillsynchq/txcript). It translates a session from one agent's on-disk format into another's, mapping conversation, reasoning, and tool history. Think ffmpeg or pandoc, but for agent sessions. On top of that engine is a local-first desktop app. Your agent sessions are normally scattered across different tools' folders in formats you'd never read by hand; the app surfaces them in one place with a UI that makes them actually readable, the conversation, the reasoning, and the tool calls, so you can revisit what happened, move a session into another agent, or share it with a teammate. Skills and memory are stored as portable, human-readable markdown you own, and exposed to any agent over MCP for search and selective retrieval. Sessions and translation run locally on your machine. The one thing that leaves is what you explicitly share into a team workspace. It’s been surprising to us to see how locked-in people already are without realizing it. You don't notice you're trapped in one agent or harness until you try to leave, and by then you've got months of sessions stuck in a format only that tool can read. The lock-in is invisible right up until it's expensive. Once sessions are portable, they stop being disposable logs and become something you can actually build on, spotting patterns in how you work, handing a session off to someone else, letting a non-technical teammate pick up where an engineer left off. The session turns out to be the unit of collaboration, and right now it's being thrown away. Before Skillsync, Nars and I built an open-source payment orchestrator that let merchants route across many processors instead of getting locked into one (30k+ GitHub stars). Fighting vendor lock-in by making incompatible systems interoperate was the whole job. We came into YC with a different idea, but the more we lived inside coding agents the more we saw the same problem from the other side: your context is locked into whatever agent you start with, because every agent stores sessions differently and none of it moves. Some of the things we’re seeing people do with Skillsync are: - Moving a session between Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor mid-task, including when you hit a usage limit on one and want to keep going on another. - Thinking through a problem in a browser Claude chat, then handing the whole thread to Claude Code or Codex to build. - Sharing research sessions with a team. Everyone uploads their sessions, so teammates and their agents can build on each other's work instead of repeating it. It's available as a Mac app, CLI and MCP. Here's the demo: https://youtu.be/7hVhSnSKGl8. Would love to hear your feedback and answer questions!

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mmykola8718 de set.

I went the opposite way, and I think it's worth mentioning the cost of that choice. My conversation doesn't carry over. Only what a session explicitly recorded does. This includes decisions, open questions, verified items, and what's left to do. Anything that wasn't recorded is gone, and that's a real loss, not just a small part of the process. I went with this approach because the transcript doesn't go into a file; it goes into another live session, which messes up its flow. We've already talked about this a bit when we were discussing "how to make reading Markdown cheaper." My answer was different: don't bring it over at all. The next session doesn't need to know how we got there—it just needs to know what we decided and what we've actually verified. I don't think we've talked about this in this thread yet. Portability is all about a session that's already wrapped up. I often have two sessions open at the same time. One is building an endpoint, and the other is the screen that calls it. They need to ask each other before both build on different assumptions. Moving the transcript around won't fix this. What's needed is a message, not a copy. I made a small open-source layer for this: a mailbox and a "walkie-talkie" for sessions in the clients you've already opened - https://github.com/automatis-tools/agents-can-communicate. It doesn't transfer memory and doesn't detect discrepancies on its own. The session has to check for those things.

podviaznikov17 de set.

I have made simple macos app to export my claude sessions to markdown(plus ordinal jsonl) and i just continuously sync it to dropbox. i do the same for apple notes and imessage. so very portable https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter-notes-to-markdown/id6...

solfox17 de set.

Love this. Easily the most annoying thing about modern Agent development across Claude, Codex, etc. One nit: You don't auto-discover "archived" chats from Codex. They have to be unarchived and the app restarted before being found.

Ishwar17069520 de set.

The portability angle is interesting. We measured coding-agent sessions and found ~94.5% of the accumulated context was reused across turns. Two questions on the translation side: what gets dropped or normalized when a session crosses agents (reasoning blocks, tool-call IDs, provider-specific message types)? And is the output serialized deterministically, so the receiving agent's cache can warm up and stay warm after the move?

timwis23 de set.

Hi team, I tried to email you with a privacy question. I used the email address on your Privacy page, but it bounced back as unknown, and there's no other contact address/form on your website. Is there a way to get in touch?