feature: implement something like claude's session title

Summary

It would be nice for cortex to print out session titles in addition to session IDs in the session summary. By using the top analogy, the session ID would correspond to the PID and the session title would be akin to the process command line.

Supporting material

This is an incomplete summary of what can be found out from claude-code using introspection of the agent's subdirectory created in ~/.claude. The tool I wrote only looks at completed (exited) sessions for now.

Note that one of claude's nicer features is that the AI assigns a title to each session. The title is not guaranteed to be unique, and is generated several times.

• Each session has a JSONL file in claude (named by the session ID)
• There are periodic entries in the JSONL file that are of type ai-title and contain a heading called aiTitle. These are generally identical across multiple such entries, but the fact that there are multiple entries tells me that claude reserves the right to rename a session based on ongoing activity in it.

SESSION ID | TITLE                                    | STATUS   |     COST |     IN TOK |    OUT TOK | UPDATED            
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3eb6d5ce-# | DAM keycloak.local OpenID misconfigurat# | idle     |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-16 20:17:57
f7997777-# | Claude Code session storage location     | idle     |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-16 19:43:14
b60cb9ec-# | test1.py results pretty table            | waiting  |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-16 19:33:33
d8c7cc74-# | BMC ipmitool power-off from ks.json      | idle     |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-16 19:31:12
0c632a55-# | Cortex plugin registration               | idle     |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-16 19:22:35
f141b2a3-# | /home/galmasi                            | exited   |    $0.08 |          3 |         12 | 2026-09-15 12:34:11
6a52c577-# | /home/galmasi                            | exited   |    $0.30 |          3 |         12 | 2026-09-14 17:22:13
4d4eee3f-# | IBM RIMT onboarding process              | exited   |    $0.32 |        905 |        213 | 2026-09-13 20:01:10
d5e489a4-# | w3id.sh associative array from spreadsh# | exited   |   $13.66 |       8.1K |      32.4K | 2026-09-13 20:00:00
6388c0dc-# | /home/galmasi                            | exited   |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-10 17:31:49
d7e3acaa-# | Vault SSH key-signing policy for W3ID u# | exited   |    $4.76 |       8.0K |      11.1K | 2026-09-02 13:47:53
e5a67ccd-# | setup-step-ca-ssh                        | exited   |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-01 19:10:58
5a99886c-# | /home/galmasi                            | exited   |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-01 17:35:21
8d1c256e-# | /home/galmasi                            | exited   |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-09-01 17:35:02
2cddde10-# | nus_outpost_install.txt                  | exited   |    $0.45 |       1.3K |        912 | 2026-08-31 13:09:34
5e451d27-# | claude_network_trace.txt REST API extra# | exited   |    $0.52 |        977 |       1.3K | 2026-08-28 17:45:55
e8c4ef9d-# | roleflatten-plugin                       | exited   |   $12.10 |      81.2K |      34.8K | 2026-08-28 17:34:09
b63ae72e-# | /home/galmasi/.claude                    | exited   |    $0.30 |          3 |         12 | 2026-08-26 15:44:55
43243108-# | /home/galmasi                            | exited   |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-08-26 14:17:16
91789848-# | Asking about image processing capability | exited   |    $0.00 |          0 |          0 | 2026-08-24 12:37:20

Immediate Todos

• Do other tools (like bob, codex, openclaw, pi) have similar ways to introspect and find session titles?
• Is any of the claude information available to read in interactions as opposed to the static session information? (which would be simpler to reach for a tool like cortex)
• Are other things like tool use similarly documented in claude sessions? ... because we may want to use the python tool I'm using as "ground truth checker" for cortex
• The claude checker script should be checked into a repository somewhere (or at least a gist).

Title interception with cortex

Paraphrasing a claude prompt/response on this topic: claude code title generation happens when claude code sends its first request to the LLM in a new session. It then sends a separate short call to the messages API that requests the LLM to generate a title for the conversations.

This is "your tokens at work" being spent on something that is normally useless. Since claude code spends the tokens on generating a title for its own sessions (that it doesn't share with the user), we might as well use the feature in cortex.