Claude Code, Beyond the Prompt — Part 1: Stop Explaining Your Project Twice (The Two-File Memory System)

Part 1 of Claude Code, Beyond the Prompt — patterns from running a live automated trading system on Claude Code. Start with the intro.

You know the loop.

You open Claude Code. You explain your project — the stack, the conventions, the module that's half-refactored, the database that's named something weird for historical reasons. Claude gets it. You do good work for an hour. You close the terminal.

Next session: blank slate. All of it, gone. So you explain it again. And again the session after that.

Most people accept this as the cost of working with an AI. It isn't. Claude Code has a memory system built in. The problem is that a lot of people don't use it — and most of the people who do use it wrong, by dumping everything into one file that slowly rots into something nobody trusts.