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

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!

16 points | by cat-whisperer 2 hours ago

5 comments

  • sdesol 5 minutes ago
    This is awesome! You solve an immediate need of mine for:

    https://github.com/gitsense/chat/tree/readme-scale-knowledge

    Since I only support Pi natively, your solution will make it possible for codex/claude/etc. users to discover their conversations in my app. Will definitely include this as workaround for making codex, claude and other sessions available for discovery.

  • general_reveal 28 minutes ago
    I was thinking about doing this. If we treat ChatGPT like your local llm server, you basically open up a browser session, intercept all traffic and stick a local OpenAI compatible rest server that mutilates your input upstream through the ChatGPT ui, and then intercepts downstream and pushes it out your server.

    API call to server

    Then

    Server leverages chrome plugin to send your llm call through the plugin , through the ui, wait for response , intercept, repackage and reroute it back out as a server response.

    Then that $20 sub stretches to all uses cases for a developer.

    • cat-whisperer 21 minutes ago
      That's a clever idea, and a different direction from where we are right now. Today it only goes one way, from chat into your coding agent.

      The case I hit all the time is that an idea strikes on my commute, so I pull out my phone and start brainstorming in the Claude app. By the time I'm home I've done the research and chased down the tangents in that conversation. I open my laptop, use Skillsync to continue it in Claude Code, and start on the implementation.

    • deadbabe 24 minutes ago
      Good way to be banned
      • general_reveal 23 minutes ago
        How would they know? Only if you use a coding harness, but one could write their own harness with less obvious system prompts.

        I’m not encouraging one do this. I mostly route between the free models on OpenRouter and OpenCode free models, and I mostly write simple apps where I can casually oversee even a small model and get awesome results.

        But if you are out there spending 200 dollars a month, consider a few hacks, because that’s just overpriced. We are developers after all, they aren’t supposed to be able to trick us :)

        Edit:

        Piracy, with the above , would look like a universal server that routes between all provider UIs. That means the end user doesn’t even give a shit which provider it goes to, serious token usage, serious theft.

        Someone could make this , I suppose. In a way, commodification is a clean solution to the inevitable theft. It’s better it just be so darn cheap and ubiquitous.

      • cat-whisperer 20 minutes ago
        isn't that what they did to opencode? when they were using the subs by reverse engineering their APIs
  • podviaznikov 27 minutes ago
    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...

    • Nars088 10 minutes ago
      Cool! Over here we mean portability in a different sense: being able to continue a session in another agent as if the entire conversation history was there the whole time. You should not get locked into one agent simply because you built up a conversation history + memory with that agent

      Also curious, do you further process the synced files on dropbox at all? how are you using them today?

  • pjm331 50 minutes ago
    If I were you I would look into maybe like analyzing sessions across harnesses? I’m not sure, some way to leverage this shared schema work that is not syncing

    Because syncing is trivially solved by just telling the agent to keep a work journal in markdown

    • cat-whisperer 35 minutes ago
      We do that, and it's really the point of the portability work. Once every harness's sessions live in one schema, you can manage and search all of them in one place.

      The markdown journal is a fair way to do it, and a popular one. It has a couple of limits though.

      A journal comes out of a prompt, so it records one way of looking at the session. Whatever that prompt didn't ask about is gone, and you usually find out which detail you needed much later. But the raw session still has it.

      Being able to unify the schema lets you do things notes can't. You can continue a teammate's session on your own machine, or pick up a claude.ai conversation in Claude Code or Codex. The new agent gets the transcript: all the decisions in the trajectory, not a summary of it.

    • Nars088 6 minutes ago
      btw we also have an agent in the mac app that lets you analyze your sessions in all kinds of ways
    • agentdev001 25 minutes ago
      To say what the author said in another way- thats a garbage approach and completely misses the point. Sure, you can completely destroy the session by distilling it into a markdown- but thats like explaining what you did yesterday, vs having an immutable log of what you did yesterday.
  • bcorigliano 1 hour ago
    This is good, I like it!! I've been mostly working with Claude and Chatgpt for separate stuff, however sometimes one of them is stuck and I could definitely use this to start a session with the other one and see if it figures it out.

    Have you tested to see if there was any degradation happening when switching from one model to the other ? I mean some must be inevitable (maybe not!), but how much?

    • Nars088 1 hour ago
      Nars here, one of the co-founders. With longer sessions, the receiving agent sometimes decides to compact it. But the whole transcript still exists and is accessible
    • cat-whisperer 1 hour ago
      In some cases, harnesses try to obfuscate reasoning, but almost everything goes through.