Show HN: Recall – Local project memory for Claude Code

I do something similar. I've recently started having a few "starting point" files to re-explain common context (less than thirty lines per markdown file, usually) that I can point the agent at at the start of a new session, each tightly scoped to a certain domain and/or task type. That's been nice to avoid repeating myself, without the side-tracking or over-aggressive biasing-towards-previous-conversations that I've seen happen if I use long sessions or let it try to decide on its own what to pull in from larger files or trees of files. Sometimes I'll tell it to update that file based on new info from a current task, but I keep tight control over what gets pulled into task start context.

They aren't really "explaining the project" either, but more module- or task-specific preferences, hand reference pointers, or other things like "there are mixed examples of how to do certain things in this project, prefer X to Y." I use a write-everything-twice approach. After I find myself having to correct an implementation because it didn't figure out one of these things on its own from the existing code, I'll add an entry. That also avoids bloating things with "I think this is relevant" compared to "I have noticed that this is necessary."

I keep doing this because it lets me experiment with different approaches to problems without risk of it fixating on things from a previous abandoned attempt, and particularly because sometimes I'm wrong and I haven't found the agent harnesses particularly reliable at taking my word for it from a POV of "yes I know I said we need xyz earlier, but let's please entirely forget about that."

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 was tired of seeing "--resume"^W loose so much context. [edit: not --resume, I meant a new session using project memory]

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-), 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 oracle", and to start a new session with "handoff 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 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 ".

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".

This was always one of the reasons to hire interns

Honestly sounds like you’re not doing anything difficult. If I’m doing easy tasks it’s fine but if you need to do a major architectural project that spans 3 codebases and 2 clouds you’re gonna have a hard time without substantial context/memory management.