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Backfill is the no-connector path: it reads a folder on this machine, works out what is in it, uploads what it finds and describes it.

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Starting an import

The wizard is the better door for this, and not only because it has screens. It runs the import in the background, so a large folder does not hold your terminal; it survives a disconnect and resumes after a restart; and it shows you the plan before anything uploads.

Import research work

The picker, the two run modes, and what gets reviewed before it writes.

Existing imports

Watch one, read its result, resume what was interrupted.
Both doors share the same file-coverage records and delivery receipts, so completed uploads are reused whichever one you came through — switching between them costs nothing.

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What it reads

References remain references. A file recorded as a pointer to bytes you keep elsewhere is never silently turned into an upload.Sessions import as standalone. Backfill verifies their native session identity and preserves immutable retries, but it does not infer or create links to projects, experiments or runs. Nothing is guessed.

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Reviewing before it writes

Folder imports either review placement before writing, or use the explicit automatic-approval option — which is never selected for you. File and Git reconstruction drafts are saved for explicit publication review. The agent’s reading of your folder is a draft until you say otherwise. The import writes each project’s description and its own block on the project’s Overview page. No later step generates the rest of the page: a project’s summary is kept by whoever records work on it, your coding agent or the Probe daemon.

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What is left out

Not everything in a folder is research. The agent leaves out code for a shipped product (its web or mobile app, CLI or service, with that product’s tests and assets), vendored code, build output and caches; research code, configs, notebooks, results, logs and checkpoints stay, even inside a product’s repository. The review lists each left-out row with its file count and why, and nothing in it is uploaded. Left-out files are recorded as excluded and stay settled when their bytes change. To classify them again:

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Resuming

Rerun to resume. Coverage of current files is reported separately from pending delivery, so “we read everything” and “everything arrived” are never conflated.
A resume delivers the saved plan and the saved file versions. New or changed files are not silently added to that delivery — that is what --import-changed is for. A retry can never quietly widen its own scope.

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Transcripts only

Imports saved coding-agent histories without touching any folder. The picker detects them independently of which agents you currently have installed.
Protocol-2 transcript imports require a compatible engine, API and tap release. An older combination imports at the earlier protocol rather than failing.