Rewinding to an earlier message

Rewind takes a chat back to just before one of your earlier messages. You choose what goes back:

In the desktop app

• Hover one of your messages and click the rewind button for these choices.
• Or press Esc twice in an empty composer (or type /rewind) to pick the message from a list.
• A confirmation shows how many messages and files are affected before anything changes.
• After a conversation rewind, the message you rewound to is back in the composer to send again or change.
• Edit and resend (same menu) puts a message in the composer for editing. Sending it rewinds to that message first (conversation and code by default, or conversation only), then sends the new text, so the agent re-runs from there.

In the terminal

/rewind lists your messages by number, asks which one and what to rewind, shows the same summary, and asks you to confirm.

/rewind 3 code skips the questions for message 3. The modes are both, conversation, and code.

Things to know

• Your edits are safe. A file is put back only while it still holds what the agent wrote. A file you (or anything else) changed since is left as it is and listed.
• Created and deleted files. Files the rewound turns created are deleted, and files they deleted come back.
• Shell commands aren't snapshotted. A rewind can't undo what run_shell did: installed packages, generated files, git commits, deleted files.
• Undo a rewind with Undo rewind (desktop) or /rewind undo (terminal). It reverses the latest rewind, messages and files both, until you send another message.
• Not mid-turn. Rewind is unavailable while a turn is running; stop it first.
• History depth. Houston keeps snapshots for the most recent 200 turns across all chats. A turn older than that can't have its files put back, and the confirmation says so.