Daily use

Once you’ve run manthana setup, the daemon does capture, compaction, release, and sync on its own. This page is the handful of things worth typing.

The dashboard

manthana dashboard      # http://127.0.0.1:8765

Binds loopback — it’s your data, not a service. Everything you can do to a session or a compaction lives here:

Page	What it’s for
Home	Recent sessions, cost, what’s pending
Sessions	Set Work / Personal, trigger a Compact
Compactions	Hold or Release, and drill into what a digest actually says
Ask	The grounded question box over your own work
Topics	What you’ve been spending time on
Cost	Estimated API-equivalent spend, by project
Skills	Mine recurring patterns into draft skills
Actions	The local audit: what the agent did and why (including things it suppressed)
Optimize	Wire Claude Code through headroom for context compression, if installed

The five commands worth knowing

manthana doctor                                  # is everything healthy?
manthana insights --since 7d                     # token-free rollups of your week
manthana ask "why did the auth migration fail?"  # grounded, cited answer over your own work
manthana related <session-id>                    # prior work related to this session
manthana sessions --limit 20                     # list sessions, get an id

manthana insights

Session and compaction counts, estimated API-equivalent cost, work by project and outcome, recent friction, and any loop warnings — sessions flagged for repeated failures. Costs nothing, calls nothing. --since accepts 7d, 2w, 12h, or an ISO date.

manthana ask

A cited answer over your own compactions. It runs through your installed claude CLI (falling back to codex) — no API key needed, nothing goes anywhere your coding CLI doesn’t already go. If neither CLI is on your PATH, doctor tells you and ask degrades instead of erroring.

manthana ask "what did I work on last week?"
manthana ask "how did we end up choosing pgvector?" --source full

--source full restricts to full compactions, excluding the cheaper summary-derived ones. Answers end with citations; if nothing grounded the answer, it says so rather than inventing one.

manthana related

manthana related 01J8Z…
# related prior work (3):
#   0.81  [billing] make the Stripe webhook idempotent

Local embeddings over your own history. The “you’ve done this before” surface.

manthana mine-skills

manthana mine-skills                    # see the proposals
manthana mine-skills --write            # draft them to ~/.claude/skills/personal/
manthana mine-skills --threshold 0.6    # cluster more loosely

Clusters recurring patterns in your compactions into SKILL.md drafts. Deterministic and offline by default. --min-sessions (default 3) sets how many sessions a pattern needs before it counts.

manthana mcp

Serves Manthana’s read-only tools (insights, ask, topics, thread, drill_raw) to Claude Code over MCP, scoped to your local data — so you can ask about your own history from inside the tool you’re already in. Needs the optional MCP extra; the command tells you if it’s missing.

Controlling the daemon

manthana service status
manthana service uninstall     # stop capture entirely
manthana service install       # start again

Logs: ~/Library/Logs/manthana-watch.log on macOS, journalctl --user -u manthana-watch.service on Linux.

To run with different settings, uninstall the service and run watch yourself:

manthana watch --release-min 30 --settle-min 45
manthana watch --no-auto-release        # nothing releases without you saying so
manthana watch --no-sync-raw            # digests sync, raw transcripts don't
manthana watch --no-sync                # capture and compact only, push nothing

Syncing by hand

manthana sync --check    # is the server reachable and my token accepted?
manthana sync            # push released, non-personal compactions
manthana sync --raw      # also push the redacted raw transcripts

The daemon does this for you. Reach for it when you’ve just released something and don’t want to wait for the next cycle.

Recovering after a server reset

If your org’s server was wiped, migrated, or re-onboarded, your laptop still remembers what it already sent and will skip it — so your history would be permanently missing from the new server. doctor flags this when raw uploads start being rejected as unknown.

manthana resync              # dry run: what would be re-pushed
manthana resync --confirm    # clear the watermarks
manthana sync                # re-upload

resync deletes nothing locally — no sessions, no compactions, no transcripts. It only clears the “already sent” marks. And it does not widen the gate: personal and unreleased work stays put, exactly as before.

Cleaning up local junk

manthana purge --self-generated              # dry run
manthana purge --structural-junk --confirm

Older versions compacted by shelling out to claude -p, which created a transcript that was itself captured and compacted. --self-generated matches the verbatim prompt text; --structural-junk catches the paraphrased ones by requiring the session to have touched no files, have no real project, and be abandoned. Your actual sessions touch files, so they survive it.

Dry run unless --confirm, and it refuses to run unfiltered.

Upgrading

Manthana tells you when you’ve drifted behind. manthana doctor shows an agent version line, and the CLI prints a short notice on stderr when your org server runs a newer build than your agent — “latest” means your org’s server, not the newest public tag, because that’s the version your admin actually deployed. It never makes a network call on the command you ran, never prints in CI, and never prints when output is piped.

Re-run the installer. It always converges on the requested release.

curl -LsSf https://github.com/Jarus77/manthana/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh
manthana version

Don’t want the notice? MANTHANA_NO_UPDATE_NOTIFIER=1, or permanently in ~/.manthana/manthana.toml:

[update]
notifier = false

If you installed before 2026-07-19, the installer silently skipped upgrading when Manthana was already present, so you may be pinned to whatever version you first installed. Run the line above and check manthana version against what your admin expects.

Next

→ What happens to your data → Troubleshooting → Full CLI reference