// The Docs Are the Memory

Claude starts most sessions with a blank slate. It can’t tell you what we did yesterday, which server broke last week, or why I said no to an idea a month ago. So I stopped expecting it to remember, and started writing everything down where it can read it.

It all lives in an Obsidian vault on my Mac. This website, my homelab, a handful of other projects. Claude reads the notes at the start of a session and writes to them as we work. The vault does the remembering.

Also: a document that drifted out of date, a sync that failed on every run, and a rulebook that now does most of the explaining I used to do by hand.

Blank slate

Every new chat is a new hire on their first morning. Bright, capable, and unaware of anything that happened before they walked in. Claude can keep some memory between chats these days, but it’s short, and it’s Claude’s own version of events.

The tempting fix is to paste the history back in. Summarise last time and hope the thread holds. That works once. By the tenth session you’re summarising summaries, and the continuity lives in the part most likely to get skipped.

So the memory sits in files I can read, edit and argue with. Plain text, in folders, linked to each other. If Claude gets something wrong about a project, the correction goes in a note, and every session after that gets it right.

Seven notes

Every project has the same seven notes, numbered so they sort in order.

The MOC, short for map of content, is the front page. It links to everything else in the project. Overview is what’s true right now, and when a value changes the old one gets overwritten. Summary is the short version of Overview. The two get updated together so they never disagree. Changelog is the diary, dated entries saying what happened and why. Todo holds open tasks under NOW, NEXT and LATER. Watchouts is every mistake worth avoiding a second time. Assumptions is everything we’re taking on trust, marked true, false or still open as we find out. There’s a Weeknotes folder too.

Watchouts is the one that surprised me. Each gotcha gets its own entry, and it stays after the problem’s fixed. A Pi-hole setting that blocked a new app password without a word. A Proxmox firewall rule in the wrong order. A file transfer that reported success and wrote nothing. When the Ask feature on this site started inventing answers, the cause was a setting that cut the model’s prompt short without warning. That went in Watchouts with a note to check it on the next project that talks to the same model.

Assumptions does a similar job for things nobody has checked yet. Writing “we’re assuming the client signs off by Friday” somewhere visible makes it much harder to forget it was ever a guess.

Rules

The notes hold what happened. How to behave lives in a file called CLAUDE.md at the top of the vault. Add a Changelog entry whenever work happens. Ask before deleting anything. Check the clock before saying what day it is. Never write a password into a note. Each project can add its own rules on top. The homelab’s says never to suggest port forwarding, because I’ve chosen a different way in.

A second file, PERSONA.md, sets the tone. Plain English, and a list of jargon to avoid.

Jobs that only come up now and then live in skills, short instruction files Claude reads when the job matches. Setting up a project. Syncing Todoist. Writing weeknotes. Reviewing copy, which starts with Claude asking whether I want it reviewed as a friend or as an enemy. This post was reviewed as an enemy. It needed it.

That’s most of what I used to explain at the start of every chat. I don’t any more.

Drift

The system’s best moment so far was catching its own mistake. This site used to keep a document of its own, in the Hugo repo, covering DNS, email and the server. Then I moved the domain from DreamHost to Cloudflare, a day of changes, and the repo’s copy stayed as it was while everything around it moved.

The file went stale on its own while the infrastructure changed underneath it. A session reading the vault before starting work noticed the two versions disagreed, and asked why there were two.

The repo now holds a pointer, a short note saying where the documentation lives and why. One copy. Everything else links to it.

Todoist

Each project’s Todo note matches a Todoist project. Every open line carries a hidden comment with a task ID, so a checkbox and a task can be paired without guessing from the wording.

The first version ran on a schedule, twice a day. It fired on time and changed nothing. The scheduled session couldn’t reach the vault, so every run failed while looking like it had worked. It lasted a day.

So syncing moved into the conversation. Whenever a session touches a project for any reason, it reconciles the whole list in both directions there and then.

Schedules came back later, for other jobs, and those ones work. Every morning Claude looks at what landed in the Inbox and suggests where it should go. On Mondays it reads every Todo note and writes up what looks ready. On Friday afternoons it writes the weeknotes. On Sunday evenings it looks for anything misfiled. Apart from the weeknotes, they only make suggestions. Nothing moves until I say so.

Gaps

It’s only as good as what gets written down. A fresh session knows what made it into the notes, and nothing else. Skip the Changelog entry once and that afternoon never happened.

Nothing gets checked unless something looks. A Todoist task added on my phone stays unsynced until a session happens to open that project. A scheduled job that fails without saying so looks the same as one that worked, until someone spots an old date.

And the docs drift too. The stale document was one case. Another was a note describing a scheduled task that disagreed with the task itself. Writing the rules down gives me somewhere to notice when they go out of date. Noticing is still on me.

Memory

Good teams have always run on writing things down. Every onboarding guide says so, and almost nobody keeps it up, because the people who’d read the notes already know what’s in them. Claude doesn’t. It reads everything, every session, and can’t pretend to remember. That’s the best reason I’ve ever had to keep the notes up to date.