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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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…

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.

I saw /graphify recently which cuts down on exploration cost and seems more appealing (although I haven’t tried it yet)

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.

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".