In my previous article I described the wall I kept hitting with Claude Code: keeping a project on track across dozens of sessions burns an absurd amount of tokens. The fix I landed on was a small CLI called mini — and a few people asked me to go deeper than one article allows.

So this is the start of a series. One post per part, each focused on a single piece of the tool, with a running example you can follow along. This part is the map: the philosophy behind mini, and where the series is headed.

The one idea behind mini

Everything in mini comes from a single principle:

Keep minimal state, and send Claude only the essentials.