A Session That Already Knows Your Project

A hands-on walkthrough of driving Claude Code on a real codebase — writing and maintaining a project memory file, running a scoped bug fix from request to committed diff, and resuming sessions the next day — followed by a quick roundup of recent CLI, desktop, and SDK releases. Episode page & show notes Visit website The founding charter The core loop for driving Claude Code by hand: open a session in your project, ask for a change in plain English, review the diff, run tests, commit. The real subject is the gap between a session that starts cold and one that already knows your codebase, and how a request that names a file, a current behaviour, a wanted behaviour, and a constraint outperforms a vague ask, because the model fills any gap with its own taste rather than yours. That gap gets closed with a Markdown memory file, written by running the in-session init command, which surveys the package manifest, test setup, build, and git history before drafting instructions. The file should stay short: how to run the app, how to run the tests, and two or three conventions a new contributor always gets wrong — nothing derivable by reading the code. These files stack from broadest to most local at session start, and the automatically maintained per-project memory file is capped at roughly two hundred lines or twenty-five kilobytes, while everything else is not. A worked example — moving email validation from submit-time to on-blur — shows the loop end to end: Claude reads the form and schema, proposes a scoped fix, runs the test command from memory unprompted, surfaces a failing existing test, and waits for a human call on which behaviour is correct. The diff stays small because the request stayed narrow. Sessions persist as transcripts on disk automatically, restarted with a continue flag for the most recent one or a resume flag for a picker across past sessions, with branching and renaming available mid-session — though transcripts older than thirty days get cleaned up by default. The closing warning: an unmaintained memory file rots into a wiki of contradictory, stale instructions that Claude will obey confidently anyway, so it needs treating as short, living, and checked every quarter. The show's news beat, skewed hard The current CLI release adds a per-loop breakdown to the usage command and separate cache lifetime settings for main sessions versus subagents, plus a model-picker setting and managed pricing for enterprise contracts. Recent releases also fixed lost plan-mode state on restarted remote workers and added automatic resumption after a rate limit, with a matching auto-continue toggle on the desktop app's limit notification. A research-preview design command now opens an editable canvas for implementing frontend interfaces, and the Python SDK has hit version one with a CLI migration helper for teams still on the old client conventions.