Skip to main content
A checkpoint captures the state of your workspace files at a point in time, so you can revert to it later. Think of it as a save point: create one before a risky change — or let ReasonOS create one for you before every agent turn — and roll back if you don’t like what happened. Checkpoints are independent of git. They snapshot file content directly, so a revert always works regardless of what you’ve done with git in the meantime — commits, rebases, stashes. Restores write bytes back to disk; there is no merging and there are no conflicts.
Checkpoints are local, disposable state on your branch node (they live under the workspace’s .rbs/ directory, which is not committed). They do not travel with the branch through git, and they are meant for short-lived undo — old ones are pruned. Anything you want to keep, commit.

​
Automatic checkpoints

When you chat with the agent in the ReasonOS editor, the branch node creates a checkpoint before the agent starts processing each message — synchronously, so the snapshot always captures the true pre-modification state of your files. The editor shows these alongside the conversation, which is what powers the per-turn Revert action: undo everything an agent turn did with one click. The same happens before the agent responds to an @agent mention on a task board card, since the mention may ask for real work on files. Automatic checkpoints record which agent session they belong to, so you can list a session’s save points and walk them as a chain (see below).

​
Manual checkpoints

Create one yourself before anything you might want to unwind:
With no file arguments, all files that git reports as modified are included.
rbs cp is an alias for rbs checkpoint.

​
Inspecting and reverting

Checkpoint IDs can be abbreviated to any unique prefix. diff shows which files have been modified, added, or deleted since the checkpoint was taken — a preview of exactly what revert will touch. revert restores every snapshotted file to its checkpointed content. Files that did not exist when the checkpoint was created are deleted; files modified since are overwritten. If you have the ReasonOS editor connected to the same branch node, open tabs and the file tree refresh automatically after a revert.
revert overwrites current file content without asking. Run rbs checkpoint diff <id> first if you’re not sure what will change — or create a fresh checkpoint before reverting, so the revert itself is undoable.

​
Session chains

Checkpoints created within one agent session link to each other, oldest to newest. chain walks those links back to the start of the session:
That gives you the session’s timeline of save points — one per conversation turn for automatic checkpoints — so you can pick how far back to roll rather than only undoing the last turn.

​
Cleaning up

prune also garbage-collects the underlying content that no remaining checkpoint references. Snapshots are content-addressed and compressed, so checkpoints are cheap — but they are still meant to be short-lived working state, not an archive.

​
Command reference