Claude Code is brilliant inside a session and completely amnesiac between them. Close the terminal, come back tomorrow, and it has forgotten your architecture, your preferences, the bug you already solved, and the decision you made last week. So you spend the first ten minutes of every session re-explaining your project — and it still cheerfully suggests something you ruled out yesterday.
That cold-start tax adds up. Here's the small system I use to kill it. No plugin, no extension, no subscription — just three plain Markdown files and two habits.
The key insight
Claude Code automatically reads a file called CLAUDE.md at the start of every session. That's the whole hook. Instead of treating it as a static config file, treat it as a doorway: have it carry a short protocol that tells Claude to rebuild its own context before doing anything.
Split the context across three files by how often each changes:
