How to delete Amp thread history, and what you lose

one thread is one file, so deleting one conversation is deleting one file

Amp writes each thread to its own JSON file, with no database and no index beside it. That makes it the easy case: removing one conversation means removing one file, and the other threads are not touched.

Where the threads are

On Linux, Amp follows XDG_DATA_HOME when it is set:

${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/amp/threads/*.json

On macOS and Windows, the directory is ~/.local/share/amp/threads/ as well. Each *.json file is one thread, holding its id, its title, when it was created, and its messages.

How to delete one thread

Close Amp first, so a running thread cannot write its file back. Then find the thread by its title and remove that file:

grep -l '"title": *"the title you remember"' ~/.local/share/amp/threads/*.json
rm ~/.local/share/amp/threads/<file>.json

To delete every thread at once, remove the whole directory:

rm -r ~/.local/share/amp/threads

Use ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/amp/threads instead if you set that variable on Linux.

What you lose

The thread is the record of what Amp tried, what worked and why. Once its file is gone, the local copy of that record is gone too. There is no archive on disk to recover it from, unless you keep a separate backup.

These files are Amp's local copy. Amp also keeps threads in your account on its service, and deleting a local file does not delete the thread there. If that copy has to go too, use Delete in the thread's More Actions menu on ampcode.com/threads/T-…, or amp threads delete from the CLI. Either removes the thread permanently, unlike archiving, which keeps it readable at its URL (Amp's thread docs).

Keeping it searchable instead

deja reads Amp's thread files, alongside the other agents' histories, into one local index:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh
deja "Amp thread about the rate limiter"

Indexing and search stay local, credentials are stripped, and deja forget removes a thread from the index when you do want it gone. A thread whose file you deleted stays readable under the Deleted tab of the screen bare deja opens; deja does not write Amp threads back, since Amp loads them from ampcode.com.

Where every agent keeps its history · Memory for Amp · The Amp format

Found this useful? Star deja-vu on GitHub.