Prompt History¶

Every prompt you submit to sase run (and every launch started from ACE) is recorded in the prompt-history store at ~/.sase/prompt_history.json. The sase prompt command group is the first-class way to inspect, search, reuse, curate, and clean up that history. It is built to feel like a well-made shell-history tool: fast to scan, exact when printing text, safe around destructive actions, and scriptable through stable JSON.

sase prompt reads and writes the existing JSON store directly — there is no separate database to manage. Replay commands (run, edit, select) route through the same launch machinery as sase run, so foreground, --daemon, multi-prompt, multi-model, and xprompt behavior stay identical.

Selectors¶

Prompts are addressed by a stable content ID derived from the exact prompt text, not by a recency index that would change every time you launch something new:

ph_<sha256[:12]> — the canonical ID printed by sase prompt list.
A bare hash prefix (for example 8f3a9c0d) — any unambiguous leading slice of the SHA-256 digest.
sha256:<full_hash> — the fully qualified digest when you need to be unambiguous.

If a short prefix matches more than one prompt, the command prints the colliding IDs and asks for a longer selector. Adding newer prompts never changes an existing prompt's ID.

Command Inventory¶

Command	Purpose
`sase prompt list`	List recent prompts as a Rich table (default) or stable JSON (`-j`).
`sase prompt show`	Print one prompt as raw text, Markdown, or JSON.
`sase prompt stats`	Summarize the store: counts, size, length percentiles, largest prompts, top chips.
`sase prompt copy`	Copy a prompt's exact text to the system clipboard.
`sase prompt run`	Replay a stored prompt through the normal launch path.
`sase prompt edit`	Open a stored prompt in the editor, then launch the edited text.
`sase prompt select`	Pick a prompt with an `fzf` picker, then launch it.
`sase prompt doctor`	Read-only health report for the store (parseability, duplicates, oversized, …).
`sase prompt delete`	Remove exactly one prompt by selector.
`sase prompt prune`	Remove prompts by objective criteria (`--keep`, `--before`, `--cancelled`).
`sase prompt save`	Save a prompt as a reusable xprompt markdown file.
`sase prompt export`	Export a prompt to stdout, a file, or an SDD snapshot.

list, show, stats, and doctor are read-only. list, stats, and doctor never print full prompt text — they show previews only — so they stay bounded even on a history with thousands of entries. show, export, and copy are the intentional full-text escape hatches.

Run sase prompt <command> --help for the full flag list of any subcommand.

Common Workflows¶

Find a recent prompt¶

list defaults to the 20 most recent non-cancelled prompts, newest first. Narrow it with a case-insensitive substring filter:

sase prompt list
sase prompt list -q auth          # only prompts whose text contains "auth"
sase prompt list -l 50            # widen the window to 50 entries
sase prompt list -j               # stable JSON for scripts and editor integrations

The table shows the prompt ID, last-used time, status, character count, project/xprompt/directive hint chips, and a one-line preview — never the full text.

Print raw prompt text¶

show -f raw writes the exact bytes of the prompt with no added or stripped newline, so it is safe in command substitution or a pipe:

sase prompt show ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -f raw
sase prompt show ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -f raw | wc -c
sase prompt show ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -f markdown   # metadata header + body
sase prompt show ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -f json       # metadata + full text

Rerun a prompt, optionally editing first¶

sase prompt run ph_8f3a9c0d12ab            # launch the exact prompt
sase prompt run ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -d         # launch as a detached background agent
sase prompt run ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -e         # open in the editor, then launch
sase prompt edit ph_8f3a9c0d12ab           # memorable alias for edit-before-launch

edit (and run -e) abort cleanly without launching if you save an empty buffer.

Replay under another VCS prefix¶

--prefix reuses the existing VCS-tag replacement logic, so a prompt captured under one workspace can be replayed under another without retyping it. Prefix replacement happens before the editor opens, so what you see is what will run:

sase prompt run ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -P "#gh:bob-cli"     # reuse a "#gh:sase" prompt elsewhere
sase prompt edit ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -P "#gh:bob-cli"    # adjust details after re-prefixing

This is the shared, drift-free implementation behind the sase run "#vcs:ref ." compatibility path.

Pick interactively with fzf¶

sase prompt select                 # fzf over launched prompts, newest first
sase prompt select -q auth -e -d   # filter to "auth", edit the choice, launch in daemon mode
sase prompt select -a              # include cancelled prompts as candidates

If fzf is not installed, select points you at sase prompt list and sase prompt run instead of failing silently.

Recover a cancelled prompt¶

Prompts you typed but did not launch (or whose launch failed) are stored as cancelled so you can recover them. They are hidden by default:

sase prompt list -c                # only cancelled prompts
sase prompt list -a                # launched and cancelled together
sase prompt run ph_8f3a9c0d12ab    # relaunch a recovered prompt by ID

Delete a secret¶

If a prompt captured something sensitive, remove exactly that one prompt. delete confirms on a TTY unless you pass --yes; in a non-interactive shell it refuses to act without --yes:

sase prompt delete ph_8f3a9c0d12ab        # confirms before removing
sase prompt delete ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -y     # skip the prompt (e.g. in scripts)

Because IDs are content-addressed, deleting a prompt removes every stored copy of that exact text.

Prune cancelled or old prompts¶

prune cleans up by objective criteria. Predicates intersect, and --keep is a hard floor that always preserves the newest N entries. Always preview with --dry-run first:

sase prompt prune -c --dry-run            # show which cancelled prompts would go
sase prompt prune -c -y                   # remove all cancelled prompts
sase prompt prune -k 500 -y               # keep only the 500 newest prompts
sase prompt prune -b 2026-01-01 --dry-run # preview removing entries older than a date

--before accepts YYYY-MM-DD, YYmmdd, or a full YYmmdd_HHMMSS SASE timestamp. A dry run never mutates the store, and neither delete nor prune will rewrite a corrupt or unreadable store.

Save a prompt as a reusable xprompt¶

Bridge a useful one-off prompt into a durable xprompt so you can trigger it with #name:

sase prompt save ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -n fix-auth-review -t review
sase run "#fix-auth-review"               # the existing loader resolves it

sase prompt save ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -g       # write to ~/.xprompts/ instead of ./.xprompts/
sase prompt save ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -p bob   # namespace under ~/.config/sase/xprompts/bob/

With no --name, save derives a deterministic slug from the prompt preview. It never overwrites an existing xprompt file unless you pass --force.

Export a prompt to SDD¶

export snapshots a prompt as a committed artifact. --sdd writes under sdd/prompts/YYYYMM/ with provenance frontmatter (ID, hash, timestamps, status, and source) and a filename built from a clean preview slug plus the prompt ID:

sase prompt export ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -s              # SDD snapshot under sdd/prompts/YYYYMM/
sase prompt export ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -o prompt.md    # write to an arbitrary path
sase prompt export ph_8f3a9c0d12ab -m              # stdout, wrapped in frontmatter
sase prompt export ph_8f3a9c0d12ab                 # stdout, byte-exact (like show -f raw)

Existing destination files are never silently overwritten — pass --force to replace one.

Health and Scripting¶

doctor is a read-only diagnostic that never echoes full prompt text. It reports the store path, size, and parseability; entry and cancelled counts; invalid or duplicate entries; oversized prompts; very short prompts saved through recovery paths; and whether fzf and a clipboard command are available:

sase prompt doctor          # pretty report
sase prompt doctor -j       # stable JSON for editor integrations
sase prompt stats           # length percentiles, largest prompts, top chips
sase prompt stats -j

The -j JSON output of list, stats, and doctor uses a stable schema and degrades cleanly under NO_COLOR or when piped to a non-TTY, making it safe to build tooling on top of.