Last week a Claude Code session told me that my order queue had 180 open items, that none of them was older than 13 days, and that 221 of the 254 entries had been written by Claude Code sessions. It had counted itself. The largest single mailbox in the system was the system working on itself: 36 orders, about 30 of which were the tooling improving its own tooling.
I had not looked at that list in a while. That is the part worth writing down.
What is in this post: how one TODO.md per project stopped working at ten projects, the shape the replacement settled into, three things that broke and the gate each one left behind, and what the whole thing still costs me. The middle part is the one to steal if you work across more repositories than you can hold in your head, whichever tools you drive them with.
Ten projects and one Markdown file
I started working across multiple projects with Claude Code at the end of last year. Back then the whole system was a TODO.md in each project folder. I opened a session, said what needed doing, and the file kept the rest. For two or three projects that is completely fine. I would recommend it.
