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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

How does this beat a Session specific README?

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}

Doesn't Claude have memories like Codex?

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.

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

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.

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)

Nothing wrong with a toy project.

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

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

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

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?

How is this different than just using a resume?