Context Persistence Across Sessions

Every Claude Code session starts fresh. The conversation history, the files Claude has read, the decisions you made together — all of it resets when you close the terminal. This is by design, and for short tasks it is fine. But for multi-day features, architectural refactors, or any work that spans sessions, losing context means re-establishing it every morning. That is expensive in time, tokens, and fidelity. The question is not whether to persist context — it is how.

The /resume command recovers a previous session if you accidentally close the terminal. This is the simplest persistence mechanism and the most underused. But /resume only works for accidental closures — it recovers the last session, not an arbitrary past session. For deliberate context persistence, the "save to file" pattern is more reliable. Before ending a session, tell Claude: "Save our current progress, decisions, and outstanding work to a PROGRESS.md file." Claude writes a structured summary that captures the state of the work. Next session, you start with "Read PROGRESS.md and resume where we left off."

CLAUDE.md itself is the ultimate persistence layer. When you discover something during a session — a codebase pattern, a convention, a constraint — add it to CLAUDE.md immediately. It will be there for every future session, for every team member, automatically. The session-level decisions live in PROGRESS.md files. The permanent knowledge lives in CLAUDE.md. The combination gives you both short-term continuity and long-term institutional memory. The best developers treat every session as an opportunity to improve the CLAUDE.md for all future sessions.