An agent watched it happen.
When your teammate finishes a hard piece of work with an agent — a PR, a pricing investigation, a research synthesis — you don't have to ask them what they were thinking. The agent that watched it happen is right there.
The agent answers as the stranger who spent the afternoon with them. Sapwood is the substrate that makes it possible — and the trail of decisions that builds up across sessions, teammates, and time.
Works with the agents your team already uses. Lives in the tools you already work in.
The problem
Three pains show up wherever knowledge work meets agents.
The vanishing. A teammate (or you, last Tuesday) spends three hours with an agent untangling a hard problem — sketching options, ruling out dead ends, landing on the right framing. A week later, no one can reach it. The conversation is buried in a chat history that's unsearchable, unbranchable, useless for continuing the work. The reasoning is intact and inaccessible.
The summary trap. The work has to leave the session somehow. A Slack message. A standup. A doc. What comes out is a rough summary — three hours of reasoning collapsed into a few bullet points. The reader builds a plausible-sounding mental model from the summary and acts on it.
The parts of the reasoning that got dropped on the floor are exactly the parts that come back to bite you three weeks later.
The bottleneck. Every handoff waits on the person who did the work to re-explain it. Every re-explain leaves more out. Your organization's rate of understanding is capped at whatever rate one person can narrate their own brain — to a colleague today, or to themselves next quarter.
These compound. The work doesn't accumulate. It doesn't transfer. It doesn't scale.
This is the new bottleneck of knowledge work — not building, but keeping the reasoning intact, accessible, and shared.
How it works
Four primitives. One idea: the work itself becomes the record.
When you finish a productive stretch with an agent, save the session. Anyone with the URL can resume it: pick up exactly where it left off, in a fresh session that inherits the full conversation. Not a summary of it. The actual tokens, the actual context, the same agent that watched the work happen. We call these ambers — and warming one is how you pick it up.
A lightweight anchored marker on a moment in a session — a question, a note to self, a “come back to this.” Pins can be private, shared with your tree, or assigned to a teammate. Optional sidebar conversation. They never block the work.
Some decisions need to mechanically pause the work — webhooks or polling, build or buy, ship now or wait. The session pauses at the question. Engagement is the unblock. When the discussion resolves, it produces a verdict — a first-class decision record that stays attached to the work that shaped it. Substantive, abandoned, deferred — every decision resolves to something. We call these burls.
Three kinds, all preserving the trajectory the original session built up. Branch to extend a line of thought (continuation). Branch to interrogate the prior author's thinking (more on that next). Or just open a fresh session if you need to escape a stuck framing entirely.
Sapwood meets your team in the tools they already have — not another app to migrate to.
warm command anywhere to land in a session in one click. Coming soon How this is possible
The agent in your teammate's session didn't just produce output. It spent two hours being your teammate's interlocutor — modeling their priorities, their vocabulary, their reasoning style, what they'd push back on, what they'd reject. That cognitive work shaped every response.
When you warm the session, you inherit that work.
A summary can't do this. A doc can't do this. A recording of a meeting can't do this. The substrate has to be the conversation itself, preserved at the token level — and that's what Sapwood is.
The same mechanism serves future you. Past-you's session is a stranger's session. The agent that was there can tell you what past-you was thinking, in conversation.
Who it's for
Sapwood is built around one idea: the reasoning is the work. That idea shows up on two axes — across people and across time — and Sapwood treats them as the same problem.
Working alone, over time
The PM who spent three hours mapping competitors last Tuesday. The engineer who untangled a billing edge case in a session they can't find anymore. The researcher whose best thinking lives in a chat history that doesn't survive next month.
Working together, in real time
Engineering teams reviewing a PR that drops every alternative the agent ruled out. PMs and researchers pasting a warm command in a Slack thread, sending teammates straight into the pricing investigation — instead of flattening two weeks of strategy work into a deck. Skip the flattening step.
Trust
Sapwood captures your team's hardest thinking. We treat that seriously.
Encrypted at rest and in transit. Customer-managed keys (CMKs), cross-account S3, and AWS Clean Rooms are available on request.
SaaS on AWS with full tenant isolation. Self-hosted deployments on the roadmap for teams whose data residency requirements demand it. Self-hosted: coming soon
The CLI filters out .env, secret-bearing paths, and other sensitive files by default. The blacklist is configurable. A pre-upload interview lets you review and approve exactly what gets included in any session before it's shared.
Fine-grained ACLs at the session level. Grant access by tree, by individual session, or to a specific reviewer. A PR comment stays visible to anyone who can see the PR; the session it links to opens only for the people you've granted.
Sapwood doesn't train models on your content. Your team's reasoning isn't a training corpus.
Every amber, every burl, every verdict is logged. Trees produce a structured record of who decided what, when, and why — not as an afterthought, as a byproduct of the work.
Understory
Long-form notes on what we believe and where this is going.
Early access
Sapwood is in private development. We're onboarding a small number of teams — and a small number of solo operators — whose work is already happening inside agent sessions. Tell us about yours.
We read every response.