claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix [FEATURE] Allow hooks (and/or skills) to set the chat session title [2 comments, 2 participants]

Preflight Checklist

• I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Today, the only way to title a chat session is for the user to manually invoke /rename from the input box. This makes consistent, automated naming impossible, even though chat names are the primary mechanism for finding past sessions via /resume.

I do many PR reviews per week (often several per day across multiple repos), and I want each review session named consistently so I can come back to a specific review later. The naming pattern itself is mechanical, e.g. PR review: <repo>#<pr-number> (<author>), but I have to remember to type /rename every single time at the start of the session, and after months of trying I still forget more often than not. After a busy week the session list is full of auto-generated topic titles that I can't tell apart.

The same applies to non-review sessions: a one-line title summarizing what the session was about would make /resume actually useful for retrospection. Claude already produces good end-of-turn summaries so there's no reason a title can't be derived automatically.

This is an event-triggered automation (when a session reaches a meaningful state, set its title), which is exactly what hooks are for. But hooks today have no mechanism to do it.

Proposed Solution

Add a way for hook output to set the session name. The cleanest shape is a new field on hookSpecificOutput:

{
  "hookSpecificOutput": {
    "hookEventName": "UserPromptSubmit",
    "setSessionName": "PR review: repo-name#1001 (author)"
  }
}

Honored on UserPromptSubmit, Stop, and PostToolUse (so the title can be set/refined as the session takes shape, e.g. after the first gh pr view call reveals the author). Idempotent: setting the same name is a no-op; setting a different name replaces it (matching /rename behavior).

A user prompt hook (the LLM-evaluated kind) is a particularly good fit here:

{
  "hooks": {
    "UserPromptSubmit": [{
      "hooks": [{
        "type": "prompt",
        "prompt": "If this is the first prompt of a PR review session, output JSON {\"hookSpecificOutput\":{\"hookEventName\":\"UserPromptSubmit\",\"setSessionName\":\"PR review: <repo>#<num> (<author>)\"}}. Otherwise output {}. User prompt: $ARGUMENTS"
      }]
    }]
  }
}

That gives users full control over naming policy without baking any heuristics into Claude Code itself.

Alternative Solutions

I tried each of these before filing:

1. Memory / preferences telling Claude to rename proactively. Doesn't work. Claude can't invoke slash commands; they're user-input-only and not exposed as tools. Even with a system-reminder injected via additionalContext, there is no tool Claude can call to set the title.

2. Hook that writes directly to ~/.claude/projects/<hash>/<session-id>.json. This file has a "name" field, but writing to it from a hook is undocumented, races with the running session, and could break on any Claude Code update. But this is a hack so I wouldn't go with it.

3. A claude rename <session-id> <title> CLI command. Doesn't exist today. Would also work as a solution if added (a hook could shell out to it).

4. Manual /rename (the status quo). I forget very often.

Priority

Medium - Would be very helpful

Feature Category

Configuration and settings

Use Case Example

A typical PR review session today:

1. User pastes a request: "Please review https://github.com/organization/repo-name/pull/1001"
2. Claude calls gh pr view 1001 --json author,title to fetch metadata
3. Claude reviews the PR, writes a pending review on GitHub
4. Session ends with an auto-generated topic title like "Reviewing CI flaky-test fixes"

Two days later the user wants to recall what they decided about that specific PR. They run /resume, scroll through 40 sessions with similar-sounding auto-titles, and can't find it.

With this feature:

1. Same request as above.
2. The user's UserPromptSubmit hook (a prompt hook) detects the GitHub PR URL and emits setSessionName: "PR review: repo-name#1001 (author)". (Author can be backfilled via a PostToolUse hook on the gh pr view call if not in the URL.)
3. The session is immediately findable via /resume — searching for repo-name#1001 or author jumps straight to it.

Same approach generalizes: a Stop hook could derive a one-line summary from the conversation and set it as the title for any session, not just reviews.

Additional Context

Investigation notes (in case it saves you time):

• I went through every documented hook output field: systemMessage, decision, continue, stopReason, suppressOutput, hookSpecificOutput.{permissionDecision, additionalContext, updatedInput}. None of them control session metadata.
• I checked whether /rename is exposed as a tool or skill (it isn't). Slash commands appear to be parsed only from user-typed input.
• The update-config skill and the settings JSON schema confirm there's no sessionName-related field anywhere in settings or hook outputs.
• Session JSON files at ~/.claude/projects/<hash>/<session-id>.json do contain a "name" field, which suggests the underlying data model already supports programmatic naming (it's just not surfaced as an API).

Implementation note: option 2 from "Proposed Solution" (exposing /rename as a tool to Claude) is more flexible but pushes title-quality decisions into the model's tool-use loop, which is wasteful for what is essentially a deterministic operation. Option 1 (hook-driven) keeps it deterministic and user-controlled, that's why I'd lead with it.