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Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

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Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#91

Post by AndyNemmity »

dnautics wrote: post #88
AndyNemmity wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that were true. Models don't feel like they've really had massive leaps. They do get better, but not enough to change any of the configuration I have. But you are correct, there is a real possibility that the time invested with be obsolete at some point. For sure the work towards MCPs are basically obsolete via skills. These things happen.

i don't understand this mcp/skill distinction? one of the mcps i use indexes the runtime dependency of code modules so that claude can refactor without just blindly grepping. how would that be a "skill"? just wrap the mcp in a cli? fwiw this may be a skill issue, pun intended, but i can't seem to get claude to trigger skills, whereas it reaches for mcps more... i wonder if im missing something. I'm plenty productive…

So MCPs are a bunch of, essenntially skill type objects. But it has to tell you about all of them, and information about all of them up front.

So a Skill is just a smaller granulatrity level of that concept. It's just one of the individual things an MCP can do.

This is about context management at some level. When you need to do a single thing within that full list of potential things, you don't need the instructions about a ton of other unrelated things in the context.

So it's just not that deep. It would be having a python script or whatever that the skill calls that returns the runtime dependencies and gives them back to the LLM so they can refactor without blindly greping.

Does that make sense?

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#92

Post by scubbo »

I've been tinkering with building something similar for myself - though for a generic chatbot, rather than for Claude (not every task is coding, and I'd like to keep !). From other comments (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46428368, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46427950) suggest that many others are already ahead of me. Any recs for tools, libraries, or approaches that I should learn from or adopt? In particular, I've found that - no matter how direct and clear the system prompt is - models have a tendency to respond verbally as if they've made a tool-call recording some gained-knowledge ("thanks! I'll remember that"), but to not actually return the JSON required to trigger the call by the tool.

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#93

Post by AndyNemmity »

_the_inflator wrote: post #45
JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #18

Is anyone else just completely overwhelmed with the number of things you _need_ for claude code? Agents, sub agents, skills, claud.md, agents.md, rules, hooks, etc. We use Cursor where I work and I find it a good medium for still being in control and knowing what is happening with all of the changes being reviewed in an IDE. Claude feels more like a black box, and one with so many options that it's just overwhelming,…

I like the finetuning aspect to it quite a lot. It makes sense to me. What I achieved now is a very streamlined process of autonomous work of an agent, which can more and more often be simply managed than controlled on a code review level basis for everything. I agree that this level of finetuning feels overwhelming and might let yourself doubting whether you do utilize Claude to its optimum and the beauty is, that f…

Yeah, at a certainly level, it's just a ton of fun to do. I think that's why so many of us are playing with it.

It's also deeply interesting because it's essentially unsolved space. It's the same excitement as the beginning of the internet.

None of us know what the answers will be.

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#94

Post by bg_tagas »

austinbaggio wrote: post #78
sabareesh wrote: post #40

Non starter for us, we cant ship propriety data to a third party servers.

I assume this is with work? And also assume you do send data, you just need some service agreement or something like with AWS or Microsoft for GH?

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#95

Post by bpolly »

brigandish wrote: post #58
dimitri-vs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Claude Code 30+ hr/wk and always have a at least three tabs of CC agents open in my terminal. Agree with the other comments: pretty much running vanilla everything and only the Playwright MCP (IMO way better than the native chrome integration) and ccstatusline (for fun). Subagents can be as simple as saying "do X task(s) with subagent(s)". Skills are just self @-ing markdown files. Two of the most important th…

How can you - or any human - review that much code?

From personal experience, most of my time in Claude Code is spent experimenting, iterating, and refining approaches. The amount of code it produces as it relates to time spent working on it tends to be pretty logarithmic in practice.

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#96

Post by Normal_gaussian »

brigandish wrote: post #58
dimitri-vs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Claude Code 30+ hr/wk and always have a at least three tabs of CC agents open in my terminal. Agree with the other comments: pretty much running vanilla everything and only the Playwright MCP (IMO way better than the native chrome integration) and ccstatusline (for fun). Subagents can be as simple as saying "do X task(s) with subagent(s)". Skills are just self @-ing markdown files. Two of the most important th…

How can you - or any human - review that much code?

When I'm coding I have about 6 instances of VSCode on the go at once; each with their own worktree and the terminal is a dangerous cc in docker. most of the time they are sitting waiting for me. Generally a few are doing spec work/reporting for me to understand something - sometimes with issue context; these are used to plan or redirect my attention if I might've missed something. A few will be just hacking on issues with little to no oversight - I just want it to iterate tests+code+screenshots to come up with a way to do a thing / fix a thing, I'll likely not use the code it generates directly. Then one or two are actually doing work that I'll end up PR'ing or if I'm reviewing they'll be helping me do the review - either mechanically (hey claude, give me a script to launch n instances with a configuration that would show X ... ok, launch them ... ok, change to this ... grab X from the db ... etc.) or insight based (hey claude, check issue X against code Y - does the code reflect their comments; look up the docs for A and compare to the usage in B, give me references).

I've TL'd and PM'd as well as IC'd. Now my IC work feels a lot more like a cross between being a TL and being a senior with a handful of exuberant and reasonably competent juniors. Lots of reviewing, but still having to get into the weeds quickly and then get out of their way.

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#97

Post by parpfish »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #66
parpfish wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refuse to learn all the complicated configuration because none of it will matter when they drop the next model. Things that need special settings now won’t in the future and vice versa. It’s not worth investing a bunch of time into learning features and prompting tricks that will be obsoleted soon

I wish that were true. Models don't feel like they've really had massive leaps. They do get better, but not enough to change any of the configuration I have. But you are correct, there is a real possibility that the time invested with be obsolete at some point. For sure the work towards MCPs are basically obsolete via skills. These things happen.

It doesn’t require any major improvement to the underlying model. As long they tinker with system prompts and builtin tools/settings, the coding agent will evolve in unpredictable ways out of my control

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#98

Post by Forgeties79 »

gbnwl wrote: post #79

I'm not sure how many HN users frequent other places related to agentic coding like the subreddits of particular providers, but this has got to be the 1000th "ultimate memory system"/break-free-of-the-context-limit-tyranny! project I've seen, and like all other similar projects there's never any evidence or even attempt at measuring any metric of performance improved by it. Of course it's hard to measure such a thing…

Have you tried using it? Not being flippant and annoying. Just curious if you tried it and what the results were

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#99

Post by AndyNemmity »

lkbm wrote: post #87
AndyNemmity wrote: post #34

I don't understand the use case. I think if you don't use agents, and skills currently effectively, then perhaps this is useful. If you're using them though, we no longer have the problem of Claude forgetting things.

I'm curious how those replace this? I've barely used either, and would love to hear more.

Okay, Claude.md is an md file with instructions.

Agents are an md file with instructions.

Skills are an md file with instructions.

Commands are.. you get the point.

We're just dealing with instructions. Claude.md is handled by Claude Code. It is forgotten almost entirely often when the context fills.

Okay, what is an agent? An agent is basically a Claude.md file, but you make it extremely granular. So it only has instructions of let's say, Typescript.

We're all just doing context management here. We're trying to make sure our instructions that matter stay.

To do that, we have to remove all other instructions from the picture.

When you're doing typescript, you only know type script things.

Okay, what's a skill? A skill is doing a single thing with type script. Why? So that the context is even smaller.

Instead of the agent having every single instruction you need about typescript, you put them in skills so they only get put into context when that thing is needed.

But skills are also where you connect deterministic programs. For example, I have a skill for creating images in nano banana.

So when the Typescript Agent needs to create an image, it calls the skill, that calls the python script, to create images in nano banana.

We're managing all the context to only be available when it's needed, keeping all other instructions out.

Does that help?

Re: Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything

#100

Post by devhouse »

Feels like this is solving a problem that /compact should solve but doesn't. The fact that post-compaction Claude 'feels dumber' suggests the summarization is too aggressive? Would be interesting if Anthropic exposed more control over what gets preserved vs. compressed ... or let users provide their own summary template.
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