The morning after an update, you go to reread last week's discussion and your hand stops. The "conversation history" page you used to open is nowhere to be found. It always seems to happen when you only want to check why you dropped a draft of an app store description. As an indie developer who keeps shipping wallpaper app updates, I tend to leave my reasons sitting inside chats, so this kind of mix-up is familiar to me.
Short version: the page appears to be gone on purpose, not by accident. The official changelog entry for v2.28.2 (October 29) says, in essence, that the history page was removed in favor of a search button.
Below are three ways back to past conversations, and a habit that makes them easier to find. One note on sourcing: the descriptions of the app's screens come from the changelog, not from my own screen. The script is the one part I ran and checked myself.
First, tell the two situations apart
"I can't find my history" has two different causes:
- The design changed. From 2.28.2 onward, the entry point to a history page no longer exists.
- The conversations are gone. The sidebar went empty after a restart or an update.
The first needs no repair, only a different way of looking. The second is a different problem, and I covered diagnosis and recovery in a separate article.
The test is simple: check your app version. If it is 2.28.2 or later, suspect the first case. The conversations themselves normally still sit on disk.
Way 1: the search button
According to the changelog, the search button replaced the history page. I won't pin down where it sits on screen, since placement can vary by version and layout. I can tell you how to use it, though.
Search for a proper noun inside the conversation rather than its topic. A file name, an error message, or a short word for a decision you made. "That discussion" finds nothing, while a file name like storeListing often does.
Way 2: the conversation navigator, to move around inside one chat
The changelog says v2.28.1 (October 28) added a conversation navigator: a row of dots, one per turn, that makes it easier to jump back into a long conversation.
It helps when you have found the conversation but can't remember where the answer you want was. Use search to find the chat, then the navigator to walk through it. That two-step pairing seems the most natural to me.
Way 3: search the folder directly
When the app won't lead you there, look at the disk. Conversation data lives under .gemini/antigravity/ in your home folder (the recovery article above explains how to confirm the location).
The brain/ folder there holds plans and notes the agent assembled while working. This script searches it for a word and lists matches newest first.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# find_in_brain.sh — search documents under brain/ and list the 20 newest matches
# Usage: ./find_in_brain.sh "storeListing"
set -euo pipefail
BRAIN="${HOME}/.gemini/antigravity/brain"
WORD="${1:?pass a search word}"
[ -d "$BRAIN" ] || { echo "brain folder not found: $BRAIN"; exit 1; }
# -I skips binaries / -l prints file names only / -F treats the word as a plain string
{ grep -rIlF -- "$WORD" "$BRAIN" 2>/dev/null || true; } \
| while IFS= read -r f; do
printf '%s\t%s\n' "$(stat -c '%Y' "$f" 2>/dev/null || stat -f '%m' "$f")" "$f"
done \
| sort -rn | head -20 \
| while IFS=$'\t' read -r ts f; do
printf '%s %s\n' "$(date -d "@$ts" '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M' 2>/dev/null || date -r "$ts" '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')" "$f"
doneWhy -F? Search words often contain dots or parentheses. Passing a file name or error text through as a plain string means it is never reinterpreted as a regular expression and quietly missed. The stat and date calls each have two forms so the script runs on both Linux (GNU) and macOS (BSD). The order matters: on Linux, trying the BSD form first gets misread as a different command and prints garbage.
One caveat. I haven't confirmed whether the files under conversations/ are searchable plain text. This script only covers brain/, which holds readable documents. If nothing turns up, go back to the recovery article and check whether the files exist by modification date.
Make chats findable later: one line at the top
Even with all three entry points, searching is guesswork if the conversation carries nothing to search for. So I decided to put a tag on the first line of each conversation.
[wp-store 1101] Store text review: narrow the English description to 3 draftsA short project name, a date, and a one-line title. Searching wp-store should then pull up that project's conversations in date order.
The easy mistake, I think, is leaving conversations unnamed and trusting your memory to recall them later. Every time an update changes the screen, you find out how fragile that storage is.
Let the screen handle the searching, but prepare what gets searched yourself. That is the line I try to keep.
Next step
Check your app version. If it is 2.28.2 or later, put a tag on the first line of your next conversation. The day you need an old chat, whether one word in the search button gets you back is the real test of this small habit.