Promote writing from any Claude session into Quill (not just doc-bound sessions)

[sam-powers]

Motivation

Today the @claude integration binds a Quill document to a session that is about that document — the session transcript references the open .md, and Quill discovers it via find_session_for_markdown. For Quill to have general appeal, a user working in an ordinary Claude session (one with no associated .md file) should be able to move a piece of writing out of the conversation and into Quill, then keep collaborating on it there.

Sketch

From a normal Claude session, a slash command lifts a chosen piece of writing into Quill as an editable document, with the session linked so the in-margin @claude conversation continues.

Why it's harder than the current flow

The writing isn't already a Markdown file on disk — it lives only in the transcript. Promotion has to:

1. Extract the intended span — the whole reply? a fenced block? a user-selected range?
2. Materialize it as a .md with a .comments.json sidecar.
3. Establish the session binding without the usual markdown-path discovery hook (find_session_for_markdown keys off a real file path that doesn't exist yet).

Open questions

• Which slash command / where it's invoked.
• How the span is chosen (heuristic vs. explicit selection).
• Where the new .md lands on disk.
• The session-linking mechanism when there's no pre-existing markdown path to discover against.

Target: V2. Captured in PRD.md §7 (Backlog / known gaps).

[sam-powers]

Scoped and refined (PRD §7, commit 6684399). Pinning this to the Claude Code CLI surface and recording a dropped alternative.

Verdict: CLI-only. The value prop is continuity — landing in a doc whose @claude replies resume the conversation that produced it, not just getting text into an editor. That's achievable on the CLI because a CLI session is a resumable on-disk artifact (~/.claude/projects/*.jsonl). The promote command runs inside the session, so it already knows the sessionId/cwd and can write the sidecar pre-bound (aiSession set, createdByQuill: false). Quill then opens the doc, sees the binding, and skips find_session_for_markdown discovery — no Quill app change required, since the pre-bound sidecar short-circuits auto-bind (useFileManager.ts:105).

What's actually new: a sibling slash command to quill-integration's open-in-quill that (a) extracts the intended span, (b) writes the .md + pre-bound sidecar into the session's cwd, (c) opens it via the existing quill:// deep link. The launch/binding half already works.

Open question: span selection — whole reply vs. fenced block vs. model-judged selection. This is the real unexplored piece (a prompt/interaction design, not Quill code).

Claude Desktop variant: scoped and dropped. A Desktop chat is not a resumable on-disk session and there's no API to rehydrate one, so capture from Desktop could move the text but never the conversation — defeating the continuity that is the entire point. Desktop is the wrong surface unless/until its sessions become resumable.