Data export and session recovery sound similar until you are mid-refactor and the chat is gone. Export answers the account-data question. A handoff answers the work-continuity question.
The timing is wrong for emergency recovery.
OpenAI's ChatGPT export documentation says exports can take up to 7 days to arrive and that the download link expires 24 hours after it is received. The exported ZIP includes chat history and account data.
That is a reasonable account-data export flow. It is not a reliable mid-task recovery flow. If the task is blocked now, a download that may arrive later cannot tell the next tool what changed in the last five minutes.
The shape is wrong for coding continuation.
A transcript is chronological. A handoff should be operational. The next AI tool does not need every turn, every wrong branch, and every abandoned idea. It needs the current goal, relevant files, diff, decisions, failed attempts that matter, verification state, constraints, and the next action.
This is why plain summaries often disappoint. They compress the story of the chat, not the state of the work.
Business and workspace policies complicate portability.
OpenAI's export article also notes that ChatGPT settings export is not available for Business or Enterprise workspaces. Those customers may still have privacy and administration paths, but the point for coding continuity is narrower: not every workspace exposes a simple, immediate chat-history export path from the product UI.
So the safer design is not to make the vendor transcript the only source of truth. The repo, changed files, commits, notes, and local project memory should be enough to restart.
The better artifact is a forward brief.
A forward brief is not a diary. It says: here is the task, here is what changed, here is what is known true, here is what failed, here is what not to retry, here is what passed or failed, and here is the next smallest move.
That is the artifact that survives the session. It can be pasted into Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, or another tool without dragging the full transcript behind it.
What ShardStitch tracks instead.
- Repo truth: git diff, changed files, recent commits, and current project state.
- Decision state: what was chosen, what failed, and what should not be retried.
- Verification state: tests, commands, screenshots, or checks that passed or failed.
- Next action: the smallest useful continuation step for the next AI session.