I built a reader for the AI conversations I never re-read

There is about a million characters of AI conversation on this laptop. Seventeen sessions. Most of them were genuinely useful while they were happening: design arguments, debugging trails, decisions I would otherwise have forgotten by now.

Storage was never the problem. Claude Code keeps a JSONL log, ChatGPT and Claude export zips of JSON. The data is mine, it is complete, it is backed up. It just isn't readable. One long column of messages, no chapters, no index, no way to get back to the paragraph where we settled on something.

So I wrote a reader for it. It's called Recto.

Recto takes an export, or your local Claude Code history, and lays it out as a book. Chapters with titles and a one line intro, plus a table of contents. Full text search that jumps to the exact paragraph. Highlights in four colours with notes attached to them. An annotation list you can filter, and a margin rail for the long code blocks and tables that would otherwise wreck the page. Reading progress that survives you changing the font size.

All of it runs on your machine. Conversations are never uploaded, there is no account, there is no telemetry. Under the hood it's a small Python process serving a local page to your browser, which is the same shape as a lot of dev tools, just packaged for people who don't want a terminal.

I would rather say this before you download it than after.

The backend is the standard library. http.server, zipfile, urllib, JSON files instead of a database. PyInstaller for packaging, installer comes out around 22 MB.

Some of that was a constraint, I wanted it to run on machines where pip is missing or broken. Most of it was a bet. Every dependency is one more thing that can fail on someone else's Windows install, and a desktop app that won't start is worse than an app with fewer features. The UI is plain HTML, CSS and JS with no build step, served from 127.0.0.1.

The first version had page numbers. They were wrong, and not because of a bug. The idea is wrong for this medium.

A page number only works if it is a coordinate you can trust. Change the font size, or the column width, or the lines per page, and the whole book reflows. All of those are normal things to want to do. A coordinate that moves when you resize a window is not a coordinate.

So the reading position became chapter name, percentage through the chapter and through the book, and remaining word count. All three are independent of layout.

The interesting part is what that forced. If you can't point at "page 40", every highlight has to be anchored to something stable inside the content. Mine are anchored to message-id plus block and paragraph index, with a quote snapshot (exact, prefix, suffix) as a fallback for when the text shifts. When an anchor cannot be resolved it isn't dropped silently. It gets marked orphaned and listed, so you can re-attach it yourself.

A purchase is a signed string, not a login:

RC1-<base64url(zlib(JSON))>.<base64url(Ed25519 signature)> Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The client ships with the public key and verifies the signature locally. No activation server, no account, nothing phoning home. The trade off is real: I can't revoke a licence, and I can't count activations. For a one time purchase of a local tool, that felt like the right side of the trade.

If you try it, I would especially like to hear about these.

It's on the Microsoft Store. Search for Recto Book, or use this link: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P1F472V522J

Every copy includes a self serve 7 day trial of the AI features. No email, no card, no trial code. Reading, importing, highlights, notes and search are free permanently.

Launch price is $9.99 until 31 December 2026 or the first 100 paid licences, whichever comes first, then $14.99 one time. Details and the licence FAQ are on the purchase page: https://recto-privacy.netlify.app/buy.html

If it breaks on your export, mail me at GeRui2936@163.com and tell me the shape of the file. I don't need the content, just enough to reproduce the problem.