Graft

Why this exists

When making things gets cheap, managing what's made becomes the scarce thing. AI conversations are the newest place that problem shows up: the good ideas are in there somewhere, scattered across regenerations and dead ends, and the interface gives you one long scroll and a copy button.

Graft is a sketch of the missing layer. You fork a conversation at the turn where it should have gone differently, the map keeps every path visible, and the pieces you keep carry a marker back to the exact branch and turn they came from. Curation without amnesia.

Three decisions

• Provenance over tidiness. Every kept block wears its origin. A master document you can't trace is just another artifact you'll re-litigate later.
• Fork at the turn, not at the end. The place a conversation goes wrong is rarely its last message. The map treats the whole thread as forkable material.
• Honest scripting. There is no model behind this demo and it says so. The fork directions are authored. Faking inference to demo interaction design would be the exact noise this tool exists to cut.

What's next

Paste in your own exported conversation instead of the scripted one. Same map, same grafting, your actual work. That version needs real parsing and real empty states, so it ships after this one earns its keep.

Take the map with you

Graft also exists as a Claude Code skill, published through Canon, my curated gallery of design skills for AI agents. It reads your project's session history and renders it in this same visual language: your turns as the trunk, subagents as forks, compactions as diamonds. One self-contained HTML file, nothing leaves your machine.

claude plugin marketplace add jamesmadson/canon

Then install the graft plugin and run /graft in any project. Prefer a bare file? Copy SKILL.md from the Canon repo into ~/.claude/skills/graft/. Read it before installing, the way you should read anything you hand to an agent.

Hand-built with Claude Code. Part of jamesmadson.me.