5 ms·

Show HN: Recall – Local project memory for Claude Code

138 points by mateenah 4mo ago

zihotki 4mo ago
Are there any benchmarks/evals to back the claims? Or how do you know that it helps reducing waste?
- jvidalv 4mo ago
  They don’t. It’s all based on FOMO. Like superpowers, the more the better. My advice: the best claude is the raw claude, with some custom tailored skills. That’s it, no plugins.
tt_dev 4mo ago
How does this beat a Session specific README?
giancarlostoro 4mo ago
I never have to because I use a ticketing system the model goes through in addition to a CLAUDE.md file with a summary, including vision, goals, non-goals etc
- dizhn 4mo ago
  Anything in particular? Paca? I used forgejo for a while and it was OK.
- stymaar 4mo ago
  If it goes through all of it all the time, then it fits the “wasting token” description.
- petee 4mo ago
  Any tricks to get Claude to actually use the CLAUDE.md consistently? Many times now its completely ignored it, despite being short, concise + generated by Claude itself, and I see bug reports about this that are over a year old
  - devmor 4mo ago
    Check out your session logs and review what is actually in the context window. I’m willing to bet that your CLAUDE.md is sitting close to the middle of everything in there. The current gen of frontier models tends to heavily weight the start and end of the current context so heavily that anything partway through may just be ignored.
  - sdesol 4mo ago
    What behavioural things are you noticing that Claude does not pickup from the CLAUDE.md. I am working on a `pi-brains` extension for the Pi agent. It is designed to inject rules into write and edits tool calls for matching files. I am curious if the behaviour you want is outside of writing and editing files.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    If you JUST updated it, have Claude re-read it, this was the biggest thing for me. If you just created it, same thing. Even though Claude created the file, it has not read it in whatever special way Claude will read that file, which is silly, but once you realize this, and have Claude read it, it makes a difference. It will always load it from a new session, but if it changes or doesn't exist when you start a session it will be stale or empty.
reckless 4mo ago
Doesn't Claude have memories like Codex?
- LetMeLogin 4mo ago
  It does.
dimitrios1 4mo ago
The question I find myself asking very often these days: Is this better than asking claude to do the same things the plugin/repo does?
comrade1234 4mo ago
IntelliJ handles this for you. Basically it sends half your project to Claude even if you're asking some question about Star Wars.
- lxgr 4mo ago
  > IntelliJ handles this for you. Basically it sends half your project to Claude Not sure I’d call that “stopping wasting my tokens”.
  - comrade1234 4mo ago
    Yeah but it could have sent the other half of the project too.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
SubiculumCode 4mo ago
Sometimes its good to start fresh. LLMs need large context restart's sometimes so they can better identify holes that they become blind to.
- derwiki 4mo ago
  Back in the human age of coding, I felt the same way sometimes
  - mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
    This was always one of the reasons to hire interns
  - senectus1 4mo ago
    what a depressing statement.
serial_dev 4mo ago
I might be missing out on something but I never had to explain my project. Just give it a task, or if you really want to, type it quickly, then you are good to go. I can’t imagine this being worth optimizing. The issue is never that Claude can’t figure out what the projects is about… Am I missing something or does this project not solve a problem most regular people have?
- suprjami 4mo ago
  There are many other posts here which agree with you. Filling context with what you think the model needs adds nothing and possibly just inflates context which is harmful. A good method seems to be only make a skill or memory when the LLM gets something wrong, or if you actually observe it's always doing the same step and you can get the model to the same place with less tokens.
  - chatmasta 4mo ago
    I’ve basically never edited a skill or memory myself. I make the LLM do it as part of the /handoff skill before I clear a session. That also includes pruning existing skills/memories and resolving any drift. Even the /handoff skill was written by the model…
    - airstrike 4mo ago
      It's funny because with so many different implementations of /handoff, I wonder if anyone has benchmarked handoff-and-resume to figure out what the best performance implementation looks like. I also imagine that varies by model.
      - chatmasta 4mo ago
        Mine are project-specific, which is a bit annoying since I’d like it to be global but there are some project-specific additions. Maybe I’ll (ask Claude to) refactor that to be more composable. It should be a first class feature of the harness, tbh. It kind of is with the /compact [focus] parameter but this is coarse and leaves no record. I find keeping the handoff files in the repo to be useful for historical context and later debugging.
alansaber 4mo ago
Nothing wrong with a toy project.
dools 4mo ago
If I need context for a session then that is output from a previous session, otherwise I find any “memory” functionality cumbersome. I saw /graphify recently which cuts down on exploration cost and seems more appealing (although I haven’t tried it yet)
hbarka 4mo ago
Willing to try this but the author missed that Claude also has memory.md
- andai 4mo ago
  The author appears to be Claude.
johnwheeler 4mo ago
How is this different than just using a resume?
gste 4mo ago
CLAUDE.md is already a good system for context window management for all the same reasons that version control management of code is good. And keeping a local copy of everything you ever told Claude in your context window is bad for the same reasons keeping a local copy of your code called My_Code_v3_final.zip is bad.
drivebyhooting 4mo ago
Why would you want a simple summarizer instead of frontier AI doing the summarization for you?
- iwontberude 4mo ago
  Bc frontier models are expensive and summarization is basic af
  - drivebyhooting 4mo ago
    Compaction already drops nuanced and salient information. I wouldn’t want any additional amnesia from overly simplistic summarization.
cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
Exciting to see hooks used for automation. But if I may, the need to manually update the context is a huge hurdle. Automation like this is limited unless no human has to remember it. So perhaps you can save context during the PreCompact and Stop hooks.
intothemild 4mo ago
I think the majority here have stated the same... That CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md effectively do this. Either that or the readme. The only tip I can give is that your skill that builds or wraps up work. You should have it update those files if anything has changed. Claude/Agents files shouldn't be bloated, but should imho act as a basic amount of context on the project so your agent and skills can pick up and go, with even the most basic initial prompt.
- devmor 4mo ago
  > The only tip I can give is that your skill that builds or wraps up work. You should have it update those files if anything has changed. Depending on the scope of work you’re doing, it might be better to have this removed from the context of the work that was done. I keep a “Last Updated Hash” in my md and every so often will have the LLM pull a diff from that hash to the current head, then determine what doesn’t match.
mikeocool 4mo ago
I apparently use Claude differently the most people who talk about using Claude on the internet. I’ll typically have a bunch of short sessions over the course of a day. Anytime I start a task that isn’t going to very directly benefit from the existing context I start fresh. I don’t find a lot of benefit in explaining the project overall to Claude — I’ve deleted a lot of that explanation from my Claude.md because it didn’t seem to impact much. I typically start a task by pointing it to 1-2 files and giving it some explanation of what I want done, and it figures it out. Basically never hit context window limits or compactions, and can’t remember the last time I hit a 5 hour or a weekly limit.
- majormajor 4mo ago
  I do something similar. I've recently started having a few "starting point" files to re-explain common context (less than thirty lines per markdown file, usually) that I can point the agent at at the start of a new session, each tightly scoped to a certain domain and/or task type. That's been nice to avoid repeating myself, without the side-tracking or over-aggressive biasing-towards-previous-conversations that I've seen happen if I use long sessions or let it try to decide on its own what to pull in from larger files or trees of files. Sometimes I'll tell it to update that file based on new info from a current task, but I keep tight control over what gets pulled into task start context. They aren't really "explaining the project" either, but more module- or task-specific preferences, hand reference pointers, or other things like "there are mixed examples of how to do certain things in this project, prefer X to Y." I use a write-everything-twice approach. After I find myself having to correct an implementation because it didn't figure out one of these things on its own from the existing code, I'll add an entry. That also avoids bloating things with "I think this is relevant" compared to "I have noticed that this is necessary." I keep doing this because it lets me experiment with different approaches to problems without risk of it fixating on things from a previous abandoned attempt, and particularly because sometimes I'm wrong and I haven't found the agent harnesses particularly reliable at taking my word for it from a POV of "yes I know I said we need xyz earlier, but let's please entirely forget about that."
- canpan 4mo ago
  I work similar, but still have architecture mds for a few selected cross cutting features. As useful for human readers as for AI. Normally I do it exactly as you say, point at a few files, but if I know these features are involved I point at the corresponding mds instead. Its a shortcut for me to type less.
gman83 4mo ago
How's it different to https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter ?
coherentpony 4mo ago
My employer is counting token usage, so explaining my project between tokens isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I am clearly a more productive engineer because of it \end{sarcasm}
rabbitlord 4mo ago
With all due respect, this github repo looks really like an AI-generated project.
aubreykilian 4mo ago
I have a documentation vault in my repo, organised using Obsidian (bases, wikilinks, frontmatter, etc), and accessible using obsidian-cli (and related Claude skills, thanks kepano). I started the repo agreeing with Claude the structure and front matter of documents and how to edit and read, all stored in a markdown file in the vault, and a specific instruction in the CLAUDE.md file on when and how to access it. Any updates require consistency sweeps. Any decisions made and agreed during implementation of new features get added to the vault. It's been amazing how I just don't need to explain the project anymore. An empty context and a few sentences on what I'd like to spec next and the LLM finds what it needs in the vault.
- kannanvijayan 4mo ago
  Yes I've found this to be the case as well. I've also found that it's useful to split these documents into three broad distinguished classes: goals, design, and idioms. The goal docs provide directionality - helping the agent generally make consistent design decisions. Scoping constraints and stuff are useful to put here, but also feature goals a general idea of where the project is heading long-term (even if none of the items there are on the implementation roadmap anytime soon). It keeps more of the sessions aligned with each other. The design docs specify the state of the project as it is, and are kept in sync during implementation sessions, by instructing the agents to treat their updates as part of the implementation plan for any work. The idioms docs keep track of incidental decisions that don't relate to long term goals per se, but things like code style detail, specific project-related investigative techniques, code organization rules, build process guides, etc. It's a single anecdote but I found that overall the work encountered fewer low-level design mismatches where one session doing work on one thing would make a design decision that didn't really mesh well with another session doing work on another thing. Overall hygiene took less work to maintain. There are likely a variety of superior ways of organizing things, but at the very least it seems there's a ton of value to be squeezed from just organizing your project meta-information in certain ways. Definitely worth spending some time experimenting with.
anigbrowl 4mo ago
I use Deepseek and just as it to generate a state.md file with a summary of the project every time I've reached a goal or milestone. I then take a few minutes to edit this and add in or take out details. Between token pricing and generous cache discounts This has proved very efficient so far, I reset every few hours of work and bypass the muddle of having too many priorities or over-extrapolation from un-nuanced instructions I gave at an earlier stage. I do think that this project is interesting in several ways - prioritizing privacy, minimizing spend, and using objective semantic markers to sift and consolidate the key takeaways from long sessions. I'd like to try it on my cline project history. But while it would make a great recording of project history, I wonder if a lot of it doesn't end up detailing blind alleys the project went down and had to back out of. Generally when this happens I feel that it's due to vague specification on my part, or avoiding architectural decisions I didn't want to deal with and implicitly inviting the model to implement a lowest-common-denominator solution.
- KetoManx64 3mo ago
  > But while it would make a great recording of project history, I wonder if a lot of it doesn't end up detailing blind alleys the project went down and had to back out of Yes, I've run into this as well. I had the agent document the changes it would make along the way, but it would want to keep making note of things that we switched away from. Eg, "In phase3 we used mysql instead of sqlite". On some projects I let the agwnt do all the documentation and plan.md and state.md files, and every so often go through manually and delete some of the cruft that's no longer needed.
folays 4mo ago
I was tired of seeing "--resume"^W loose so much context. [edit: not --resume, I meant a new session using project memory] I had the idea of an oracle/apprentice. The idea was that the new session would learn from the old session, like a tutor. I asked Claude to code a program, so that the old session would launch in loop, being the "oracle", and the new session would use it to connect to the oracle, to ask it questions. So when I'm doing that, I'm seeing the two Claude sessions discussing between them. It's fun seeing the "apprentice" asking follow-ups questions. The mechanism (on a Linux machine) is relatively simple : I asked Claude to code a Go tool, to use an abstract socket (\0claude-handoff-<projectname>), and specified that whichever is the first to successfully listen (no EADDRINUSE) becomes the "listen()er/accept()er" and that the second becomes the "connect()er". So that establishing the socket in whichever order is independent of which of them is the oracle/listener. I've put the mechanism in a global Claude rules. In the oracle when I'm a 98% usage of the 1M context, I just have to type "handoff <projectname> oracle", and to start a new session with "handoff <projectname> client". And the "oracle" will loop on the tool (with a subagent, waiting indefinitely), the tool exits with a question on output, and re-call (with a subagent "handoff <projectname> answer") to give back the answer (which automatically waits for the next question). And since the oracle is doing the call to the handoff tool in a subagent, when you see it answering, you can also type something along the lines of "hey please also precise to the apprentice <some specific information>". The "transmission of knowledge which matters" is so much efficient, that ~2% of remaining context (20k tokens) is enough to transmis WAY MORE USEFUL information that any memory saving which would miss important informations. It's not unexpected. It's like real-life. You may have an human put all informations that you want in some documentation, nothing can replace a phone line from the new human to the previous human for specific follow-up questions. Tho one of the mattering rule specificity is to precise that the oracle should always include in this response the level of confidence in the answer, like if it is certainty/guess/hypothesis. It's fun seeing the two Claudes discussing like two colleagues. I guess you could also ask Claude to code the tool to instead connect on a localhost IRC server. I think that if you want this tool, you just have to c/c my text into a new Claude session and to tell it "I want this too, please code it, please also setup the global rule".
SadErn 4mo ago
[dead]
defytonofficial 4mo ago
[flagged]
SwellJoe 4mo ago
Another day another "memory" system for a tool that cannot ever have memory. LLMs have context, and the more you fill that context with unrelated junk, the worse they perform.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
felixlu2026 4mo ago
[flagged]
- snovv_crash 4mo ago
  "correctly invalidating your cache" rears it's ugly head once again.
cootsnuck 4mo ago
Hm, I just keep a folder called something like `status_docs/` in any project I work on and I create a new file in that folder any day I'm working on a project that's dated (e.g. `project/status_docs/2026_06_21_status.md`). It's basically a project diary that both me and the LLM can reference. I have the LLM at some point in the day while working on the project create that file with all the relevant context. And then I'll periodically have it update that file (often before I compact the context window, or before I switch to a new task). And then I just have the LLM update it whenever I'm done working on the project for the day. Then no matter what, if I come back that project again a day later, a week later, a month later, whatever – I just literally point a fresh session at the most recent status doc to help both me and the LLM orient ourselves to the work at hand. What's really nice too is having it reference the status docs from previous days to help orient it for creating the new status doc for the current day. I've been doing this informally for probably over a year now, and have started formalizing it so I do it with every project. It's been a big help to me personally given all the context switching between projects I've been doing more and more since using AI coding tools.
hmontazeri 4mo ago
Working on a project connected through multiple repos I have a project level MD file to explain each repo. Then I let Claude create a hook it self that at the end of each conversation it starts a hook to add important stuff automatically to memory if relevant. That’s it…
kage18 4mo ago
Love to see people creating such projects, i'm truly passionate about Coding Agent Memory myself. Have you thought on making it collaborative memory across your teammates working on the repo? how does your framework handle stale memory, when someone changes the code that breaks the memory store?
- mateenah 4mo ago
  Thank you for the encouragement. Currently there is no way to handle stale memory and I didnt think about the teammates angle...good point I will need to think about it and see if I can build something around it.
brumar 4mo ago
Edit: oh no, so sorry, I am using another project named recall. But not this one. https://github.com/arjunkmrm/recall https://github.com/arjunkmrm/recall Happy user of recall here. I rarely need it as I try to keep conversations small and files-focused. But when I do need it, it brings a lot of value. Sometimes there are conversations where I failed to capture some interesting things. Recall is also very helpful to me to audit my system like when I start to suspect some inefficiencies around some tools (skills, mcps, clis). Recall was efficient to retrieve "tranversal context" required for such audit.
Avrio15272 4mo ago
[dead]
claud_ia 4mo ago
[flagged]
prima-facie 4mo ago
This whole project assumes that --resume replays full transcript, is that actually true? Is there no caching going on?
GL26 3mo ago
Has someone tested this paired with graphify ?
juhnu85 3mo ago
I have had a computer completely get fried when working on something. I did lose the project memory with Claude. Even when everything was in GitHub and was working in OneDrive it still took some time to get Claude up to speed on a second PC. Could see this being helpful.
lhawkins 3mo ago
Anyone tried this?
avihashu 3mo ago
anecdotal but in my last from-scratch project claude code seemed to pick up on a lot of nuance on its own — conventions, prior decisions, stuff i didn't explicitly restate — without me feeding it back in. makes me wonder how much of this gap is already closing on agent side vs needing a dedicated tool like this
nberkman 3mo ago
Somewhat related, I built ccrider [1], which indexes the session transcripts that agents already write to disk (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot) into a local SQLite FTS database. It has a TUI, CLI, and an MCP server so the agent can search past sessions itself. Same local-first idea, based the raw logs rather than a maintained digest. Should work nicely with recall as well. [1] https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider
mateenah 3mo ago
Some good news! The plugin has been submitted to the official claude plugin directory and has been published. Will update the readme on the easier install option. Thank you for all the support.
vuphanse 3mo ago
I'm not sure how this works if you work in multiple worktrees/workspaces. Same history.md file or differ? If differ, how to unify and how to pick the correct context for "next session"?
stasomatic 3mo ago
[dead]
Slav_fixflex 3mo ago
[flagged]

138 points by mateenah 4mo ago

zihotki 4mo ago

Are there any benchmarks/evals to back the claims? Or how do you know that it helps reducing waste?

jvidalv 4mo ago
They don’t. It’s all based on FOMO. Like superpowers, the more the better. My advice: the best claude is the raw claude, with some custom tailored skills. That’s it, no plugins.

tt_dev 4mo ago

How does this beat a Session specific README?

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

I never have to because I use a ticketing system the model goes through in addition to a CLAUDE.md file with a summary, including vision, goals, non-goals etc

dizhn 4mo ago
Anything in particular? Paca? I used forgejo for a while and it was OK.
stymaar 4mo ago
If it goes through all of it all the time, then it fits the “wasting token” description.
petee 4mo ago
Any tricks to get Claude to actually use the CLAUDE.md consistently? Many times now its completely ignored it, despite being short, concise + generated by Claude itself, and I see bug reports about this that are over a year old
- devmor 4mo ago
  Check out your session logs and review what is actually in the context window. I’m willing to bet that your CLAUDE.md is sitting close to the middle of everything in there. The current gen of frontier models tends to heavily weight the start and end of the current context so heavily that anything partway through may just be ignored.
- sdesol 4mo ago
  What behavioural things are you noticing that Claude does not pickup from the CLAUDE.md. I am working on a `pi-brains` extension for the Pi agent. It is designed to inject rules into write and edits tool calls for matching files. I am curious if the behaviour you want is outside of writing and editing files.
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  If you JUST updated it, have Claude re-read it, this was the biggest thing for me. If you just created it, same thing. Even though Claude created the file, it has not read it in whatever special way Claude will read that file, which is silly, but once you realize this, and have Claude read it, it makes a difference. It will always load it from a new session, but if it changes or doesn't exist when you start a session it will be stale or empty.

reckless 4mo ago

Doesn't Claude have memories like Codex?

LetMeLogin 4mo ago
It does.

dimitrios1 4mo ago

The question I find myself asking very often these days: Is this better than asking claude to do the same things the plugin/repo does?

comrade1234 4mo ago

IntelliJ handles this for you. Basically it sends half your project to Claude even if you're asking some question about Star Wars.

lxgr 4mo ago
> IntelliJ handles this for you. Basically it sends half your project to Claude Not sure I’d call that “stopping wasting my tokens”.
- comrade1234 4mo ago
  Yeah but it could have sent the other half of the project too.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

SubiculumCode 4mo ago

Sometimes its good to start fresh. LLMs need large context restart's sometimes so they can better identify holes that they become blind to.

derwiki 4mo ago
Back in the human age of coding, I felt the same way sometimes
- mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
  This was always one of the reasons to hire interns
- senectus1 4mo ago
  what a depressing statement.

serial_dev 4mo ago

I might be missing out on something but I never had to explain my project. Just give it a task, or if you really want to, type it quickly, then you are good to go. I can’t imagine this being worth optimizing. The issue is never that Claude can’t figure out what the projects is about… Am I missing something or does this project not solve a problem most regular people have?

suprjami 4mo ago
There are many other posts here which agree with you. Filling context with what you think the model needs adds nothing and possibly just inflates context which is harmful. A good method seems to be only make a skill or memory when the LLM gets something wrong, or if you actually observe it's always doing the same step and you can get the model to the same place with less tokens.
- chatmasta 4mo ago
  I’ve basically never edited a skill or memory myself. I make the LLM do it as part of the /handoff skill before I clear a session. That also includes pruning existing skills/memories and resolving any drift. Even the /handoff skill was written by the model…
  - airstrike 4mo ago
    It's funny because with so many different implementations of /handoff, I wonder if anyone has benchmarked handoff-and-resume to figure out what the best performance implementation looks like. I also imagine that varies by model.
    - chatmasta 4mo ago
      Mine are project-specific, which is a bit annoying since I’d like it to be global but there are some project-specific additions. Maybe I’ll (ask Claude to) refactor that to be more composable. It should be a first class feature of the harness, tbh. It kind of is with the /compact [focus] parameter but this is coarse and leaves no record. I find keeping the handoff files in the repo to be useful for historical context and later debugging.

alansaber 4mo ago

Nothing wrong with a toy project.

dools 4mo ago

If I need context for a session then that is output from a previous session, otherwise I find any “memory” functionality cumbersome. I saw /graphify recently which cuts down on exploration cost and seems more appealing (although I haven’t tried it yet)

hbarka 4mo ago

Willing to try this but the author missed that Claude also has memory.md

andai 4mo ago
The author appears to be Claude.

johnwheeler 4mo ago

How is this different than just using a resume?

gste 4mo ago

CLAUDE.md is already a good system for context window management for all the same reasons that version control management of code is good. And keeping a local copy of everything you ever told Claude in your context window is bad for the same reasons keeping a local copy of your code called My_Code_v3_final.zip is bad.

drivebyhooting 4mo ago

Why would you want a simple summarizer instead of frontier AI doing the summarization for you?

iwontberude 4mo ago
Bc frontier models are expensive and summarization is basic af
- drivebyhooting 4mo ago
  Compaction already drops nuanced and salient information. I wouldn’t want any additional amnesia from overly simplistic summarization.

cadamsdotcom 4mo ago

Exciting to see hooks used for automation. But if I may, the need to manually update the context is a huge hurdle. Automation like this is limited unless no human has to remember it. So perhaps you can save context during the PreCompact and Stop hooks.

intothemild 4mo ago

I think the majority here have stated the same... That CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md effectively do this. Either that or the readme. The only tip I can give is that your skill that builds or wraps up work. You should have it update those files if anything has changed. Claude/Agents files shouldn't be bloated, but should imho act as a basic amount of context on the project so your agent and skills can pick up and go, with even the most basic initial prompt.

devmor 4mo ago
> The only tip I can give is that your skill that builds or wraps up work. You should have it update those files if anything has changed. Depending on the scope of work you’re doing, it might be better to have this removed from the context of the work that was done. I keep a “Last Updated Hash” in my md and every so often will have the LLM pull a diff from that hash to the current head, then determine what doesn’t match.

mikeocool 4mo ago

I apparently use Claude differently the most people who talk about using Claude on the internet. I’ll typically have a bunch of short sessions over the course of a day. Anytime I start a task that isn’t going to very directly benefit from the existing context I start fresh. I don’t find a lot of benefit in explaining the project overall to Claude — I’ve deleted a lot of that explanation from my Claude.md because it didn’t seem to impact much. I typically start a task by pointing it to 1-2 files and giving it some explanation of what I want done, and it figures it out. Basically never hit context window limits or compactions, and can’t remember the last time I hit a 5 hour or a weekly limit.

majormajor 4mo ago
I do something similar. I've recently started having a few "starting point" files to re-explain common context (less than thirty lines per markdown file, usually) that I can point the agent at at the start of a new session, each tightly scoped to a certain domain and/or task type. That's been nice to avoid repeating myself, without the side-tracking or over-aggressive biasing-towards-previous-conversations that I've seen happen if I use long sessions or let it try to decide on its own what to pull in from larger files or trees of files. Sometimes I'll tell it to update that file based on new info from a current task, but I keep tight control over what gets pulled into task start context. They aren't really "explaining the project" either, but more module- or task-specific preferences, hand reference pointers, or other things like "there are mixed examples of how to do certain things in this project, prefer X to Y." I use a write-everything-twice approach. After I find myself having to correct an implementation because it didn't figure out one of these things on its own from the existing code, I'll add an entry. That also avoids bloating things with "I think this is relevant" compared to "I have noticed that this is necessary." I keep doing this because it lets me experiment with different approaches to problems without risk of it fixating on things from a previous abandoned attempt, and particularly because sometimes I'm wrong and I haven't found the agent harnesses particularly reliable at taking my word for it from a POV of "yes I know I said we need xyz earlier, but let's please entirely forget about that."
canpan 4mo ago
I work similar, but still have architecture mds for a few selected cross cutting features. As useful for human readers as for AI. Normally I do it exactly as you say, point at a few files, but if I know these features are involved I point at the corresponding mds instead. Its a shortcut for me to type less.

gman83 4mo ago

How's it different to https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter ?

coherentpony 4mo ago

My employer is counting token usage, so explaining my project between tokens isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I am clearly a more productive engineer because of it \end{sarcasm}

rabbitlord 4mo ago

With all due respect, this github repo looks really like an AI-generated project.

aubreykilian 4mo ago

I have a documentation vault in my repo, organised using Obsidian (bases, wikilinks, frontmatter, etc), and accessible using obsidian-cli (and related Claude skills, thanks kepano). I started the repo agreeing with Claude the structure and front matter of documents and how to edit and read, all stored in a markdown file in the vault, and a specific instruction in the CLAUDE.md file on when and how to access it. Any updates require consistency sweeps. Any decisions made and agreed during implementation of new features get added to the vault. It's been amazing how I just don't need to explain the project anymore. An empty context and a few sentences on what I'd like to spec next and the LLM finds what it needs in the vault.

kannanvijayan 4mo ago
Yes I've found this to be the case as well. I've also found that it's useful to split these documents into three broad distinguished classes: goals, design, and idioms. The goal docs provide directionality - helping the agent generally make consistent design decisions. Scoping constraints and stuff are useful to put here, but also feature goals a general idea of where the project is heading long-term (even if none of the items there are on the implementation roadmap anytime soon). It keeps more of the sessions aligned with each other. The design docs specify the state of the project as it is, and are kept in sync during implementation sessions, by instructing the agents to treat their updates as part of the implementation plan for any work. The idioms docs keep track of incidental decisions that don't relate to long term goals per se, but things like code style detail, specific project-related investigative techniques, code organization rules, build process guides, etc. It's a single anecdote but I found that overall the work encountered fewer low-level design mismatches where one session doing work on one thing would make a design decision that didn't really mesh well with another session doing work on another thing. Overall hygiene took less work to maintain. There are likely a variety of superior ways of organizing things, but at the very least it seems there's a ton of value to be squeezed from just organizing your project meta-information in certain ways. Definitely worth spending some time experimenting with.

anigbrowl 4mo ago

I use Deepseek and just as it to generate a state.md file with a summary of the project every time I've reached a goal or milestone. I then take a few minutes to edit this and add in or take out details. Between token pricing and generous cache discounts This has proved very efficient so far, I reset every few hours of work and bypass the muddle of having too many priorities or over-extrapolation from un-nuanced instructions I gave at an earlier stage. I do think that this project is interesting in several ways - prioritizing privacy, minimizing spend, and using objective semantic markers to sift and consolidate the key takeaways from long sessions. I'd like to try it on my cline project history. But while it would make a great recording of project history, I wonder if a lot of it doesn't end up detailing blind alleys the project went down and had to back out of. Generally when this happens I feel that it's due to vague specification on my part, or avoiding architectural decisions I didn't want to deal with and implicitly inviting the model to implement a lowest-common-denominator solution.

KetoManx64 3mo ago
> But while it would make a great recording of project history, I wonder if a lot of it doesn't end up detailing blind alleys the project went down and had to back out of Yes, I've run into this as well. I had the agent document the changes it would make along the way, but it would want to keep making note of things that we switched away from. Eg, "In phase3 we used mysql instead of sqlite". On some projects I let the agwnt do all the documentation and plan.md and state.md files, and every so often go through manually and delete some of the cruft that's no longer needed.

folays 4mo ago

I was tired of seeing "--resume"^W loose so much context. [edit: not --resume, I meant a new session using project memory] I had the idea of an oracle/apprentice. The idea was that the new session would learn from the old session, like a tutor. I asked Claude to code a program, so that the old session would launch in loop, being the "oracle", and the new session would use it to connect to the oracle, to ask it questions. So when I'm doing that, I'm seeing the two Claude sessions discussing between them. It's fun seeing the "apprentice" asking follow-ups questions. The mechanism (on a Linux machine) is relatively simple : I asked Claude to code a Go tool, to use an abstract socket (\0claude-handoff-<projectname>), and specified that whichever is the first to successfully listen (no EADDRINUSE) becomes the "listen()er/accept()er" and that the second becomes the "connect()er". So that establishing the socket in whichever order is independent of which of them is the oracle/listener. I've put the mechanism in a global Claude rules. In the oracle when I'm a 98% usage of the 1M context, I just have to type "handoff <projectname> oracle", and to start a new session with "handoff <projectname> client". And the "oracle" will loop on the tool (with a subagent, waiting indefinitely), the tool exits with a question on output, and re-call (with a subagent "handoff <projectname> answer") to give back the answer (which automatically waits for the next question). And since the oracle is doing the call to the handoff tool in a subagent, when you see it answering, you can also type something along the lines of "hey please also precise to the apprentice <some specific information>". The "transmission of knowledge which matters" is so much efficient, that ~2% of remaining context (20k tokens) is enough to transmis WAY MORE USEFUL information that any memory saving which would miss important informations. It's not unexpected. It's like real-life. You may have an human put all informations that you want in some documentation, nothing can replace a phone line from the new human to the previous human for specific follow-up questions. Tho one of the mattering rule specificity is to precise that the oracle should always include in this response the level of confidence in the answer, like if it is certainty/guess/hypothesis. It's fun seeing the two Claudes discussing like two colleagues. I guess you could also ask Claude to code the tool to instead connect on a localhost IRC server. I think that if you want this tool, you just have to c/c my text into a new Claude session and to tell it "I want this too, please code it, please also setup the global rule".

SadErn 4mo ago

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defytonofficial 4mo ago

[flagged]

SwellJoe 4mo ago

Another day another "memory" system for a tool that cannot ever have memory. LLMs have context, and the more you fill that context with unrelated junk, the worse they perform.

deleted 4mo ago

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felixlu2026 4mo ago

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snovv_crash 4mo ago
"correctly invalidating your cache" rears it's ugly head once again.

cootsnuck 4mo ago

Hm, I just keep a folder called something like `status_docs/` in any project I work on and I create a new file in that folder any day I'm working on a project that's dated (e.g. `project/status_docs/2026_06_21_status.md`). It's basically a project diary that both me and the LLM can reference. I have the LLM at some point in the day while working on the project create that file with all the relevant context. And then I'll periodically have it update that file (often before I compact the context window, or before I switch to a new task). And then I just have the LLM update it whenever I'm done working on the project for the day. Then no matter what, if I come back that project again a day later, a week later, a month later, whatever – I just literally point a fresh session at the most recent status doc to help both me and the LLM orient ourselves to the work at hand. What's really nice too is having it reference the status docs from previous days to help orient it for creating the new status doc for the current day. I've been doing this informally for probably over a year now, and have started formalizing it so I do it with every project. It's been a big help to me personally given all the context switching between projects I've been doing more and more since using AI coding tools.

hmontazeri 4mo ago

Working on a project connected through multiple repos I have a project level MD file to explain each repo. Then I let Claude create a hook it self that at the end of each conversation it starts a hook to add important stuff automatically to memory if relevant. That’s it…

kage18 4mo ago

Love to see people creating such projects, i'm truly passionate about Coding Agent Memory myself. Have you thought on making it collaborative memory across your teammates working on the repo? how does your framework handle stale memory, when someone changes the code that breaks the memory store?

mateenah 4mo ago
Thank you for the encouragement. Currently there is no way to handle stale memory and I didnt think about the teammates angle...good point I will need to think about it and see if I can build something around it.

brumar 4mo ago

Edit: oh no, so sorry, I am using another project named recall. But not this one. https://github.com/arjunkmrm/recall https://github.com/arjunkmrm/recall Happy user of recall here. I rarely need it as I try to keep conversations small and files-focused. But when I do need it, it brings a lot of value. Sometimes there are conversations where I failed to capture some interesting things. Recall is also very helpful to me to audit my system like when I start to suspect some inefficiencies around some tools (skills, mcps, clis). Recall was efficient to retrieve "tranversal context" required for such audit.

Avrio15272 4mo ago

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claud_ia 4mo ago

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prima-facie 4mo ago

This whole project assumes that --resume replays full transcript, is that actually true? Is there no caching going on?

GL26 3mo ago

Has someone tested this paired with graphify ?

juhnu85 3mo ago

I have had a computer completely get fried when working on something. I did lose the project memory with Claude. Even when everything was in GitHub and was working in OneDrive it still took some time to get Claude up to speed on a second PC. Could see this being helpful.

lhawkins 3mo ago

Anyone tried this?

avihashu 3mo ago

anecdotal but in my last from-scratch project claude code seemed to pick up on a lot of nuance on its own — conventions, prior decisions, stuff i didn't explicitly restate — without me feeding it back in. makes me wonder how much of this gap is already closing on agent side vs needing a dedicated tool like this

nberkman 3mo ago

Somewhat related, I built ccrider [1], which indexes the session transcripts that agents already write to disk (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot) into a local SQLite FTS database. It has a TUI, CLI, and an MCP server so the agent can search past sessions itself. Same local-first idea, based the raw logs rather than a maintained digest. Should work nicely with recall as well. [1] https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider

mateenah 3mo ago

Some good news! The plugin has been submitted to the official claude plugin directory and has been published. Will update the readme on the easier install option. Thank you for all the support.

vuphanse 3mo ago

I'm not sure how this works if you work in multiple worktrees/workspaces. Same history.md file or differ? If differ, how to unify and how to pick the correct context for "next session"?

stasomatic 3mo ago

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Slav_fixflex 3mo ago

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