Session titles

A session id tells you nothing about what the session was. cca sessions shows the session’s name alongside it.

  Claude Code usage · by session · all time

  Title                                Session    water  tokens   cost
  refactor: split the billing service  7c1a9f20   2.1 L    7.2M  $9.30
  feat: dashboard charts and filters   9c1a77b0   1.8 L    6.0M  $8.20
  Invoice rounding bug investigation   3ef0d219   1.6 L    5.2M  $7.01
  —                                    51f4fc3e  841 mL    2.8M  $3.42

  ─ Cost is what this usage would cost at API rates, not what you were billed;
    Claude Code on a subscription draws from your plan allowance instead.
  ─ Water assumes 0.30 mL / 1k tokens, a rough estimate. See README.

The shortened id is still there, and is still what you paste into claude --resume.

Where a title comes from

Claude Code records two kinds of name in a session’s transcript, and cca prefers them in this order:

Source	What it is	How it gets set
custom	A name you chose	/rename, --name, -n, Ctrl+R in the resume picker, the VS Code rename
ai	A short summary of your first prompt	Generated automatically in the background
first-prompt	Your first message, truncated	Only when neither of the above exists

A name you chose always beats a generated one, whichever was written last. If a session has no usable source, cca shows a dash rather than inventing something.

Renaming works as you would expect

These records are appended rather than replaced, so a session renamed three times carries three of them. cca takes the most recent. On the corpus this feature was built against, 28 of 41 titled sessions had been renamed at least once.

Seeing which source won

cca sessions --verbose

  Claude Code usage · by session · all time

  Title                           Session   from       started  tokens   cost
  refactor: split the billing s…  7c1a9f20  custom  2026-09-14    7.2M  $9.30
  feat: dashboard charts and fi…  9c1a77b0  custom  2026-09-14    6.0M  $8.20
  Invoice rounding bug investig…  3ef0d219  ai      2026-09-14    5.2M  $7.01
  —                               51f4fc3e  —       2026-09-15    2.8M  $3.42

Useful when a title looks wrong: custom is a name someone typed, ai is a guess from the first prompt.

Turning them off

cca sessions --no-titles

  Claude Code usage · by session · all time

  Session   started     project        requests  tokens   cost
  7c1a9f20  2026-09-14  payments-api         40    7.2M  $9.30
  9c1a77b0  2026-09-14  web-dashboard        32    6.0M  $8.20
  3ef0d219  2026-09-14  payments-api         26    5.2M  $7.01
  51f4fc3e  2026-09-15  web-dashboard        12    2.8M  $3.42

  ─ Cost is what this usage would cost at API rates, not what you were billed;
    Claude Code on a subscription draws from your plan allowance instead.

Without titles the view returns to showing the project and request count.

Titles in JSON and CSV

Machine output omits titles unless you ask for them.

cca sessions --json --titles

{"key":"7c1a9f20-5dba-4b67-b952-5cd4f8d2dc34","title":"refactor: split the billing service","title_source":"custom"}

cca sessions --csv --titles

Why opt-in

A title describes what you were working on, and the first-prompt fallback is literally your prompt text. --json and --csv output gets committed to repositories, pasted into issues, and piped into other tools, so titles are left out unless explicitly requested.

--no-titles suppresses them everywhere and overrides --titles.

Machine output carries the full title and the full session id; the table truncates the title and shortens the id for display only.

Limits worth knowing

cca will sometimes show a title the VS Code sidebar does not. The extension reads only the last 64KB of a transcript, so on a long session a rename can fall outside that window and the sidebar loses it. cca streams the whole file. This is a better result, not a discrepancy to report.

A title can be wrong rather than merely missing. There is an upstream bug where deleting a transcript lets Claude Code reuse the session id for a new conversation, and the new session inherits an unrelated title. cca cannot detect this — which is one reason titles never influence anything but display. No cost, token, deduplication, sorting, or filtering logic reads one.

Desktop and claude.ai/code sessions are out of scope. Those surfaces keep their own history, and their titles do not reliably reach the local transcript. cca covers CLI sessions.

Duplicate titles are legal. Two sessions can carry the same name, and cca never groups or deduplicates by title.

Display handling

Titles are user-controlled text, so they are sanitized before reaching your terminal: escape sequences and control characters are stripped, and newlines and tabs collapse to single spaces. Truncation is by display width, so a title in Japanese or one containing emoji lands in the same column as an ASCII one rather than pushing the table out of alignment.