I kept hitting the same wall with long-running Claude Code projects. The agent plans beautifully, works hard for a session… and then the context window rolls over, or I /clear, and the plan is gone. Chat scrollback became my project management system. Meanwhile my actual Jira board — the one other humans look at — knew nothing. The fix that stuck for me wasn’t better prompting, it was moving the source of truth out of the conversation entirely. Everything the agent plans or ships gets mirrored to the real tracker as it happens: issues, comments, worklogs, estimates. The plan lives in git. When a session dies mid-task, the next one picks up from the tracker + a handoff file, not from vibes. The part I underestimated: verification. Agents will absolutely close their own tickets because closing is easier than testing. What worked was a goal-backward gate — the phase isn’t done because issues got closed; issues get closed because a verifier walked backward from the goal and found evidence. Plus drift detection between what the plan claims and what git actually shows. The other surprise was memory. Storing “lessons learned” as freeform notes rotted fast. What held up: lessons as cards pointing at the exact commits that prove them, with a confidence grade that gets re-checked later — confirmed lessons grade up, contradicted ones grade down and get corrected. Stale memory confidently outranking fresh reality is a real failure mode; I’ve watched other tools in this space wrestle with it. I ended up building all this into an open-source plugin (MIT). It also turned out the same server runs under Grok, Copilot CLI, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, OpenCode, and Zed since the whole thing is just MCP + markdown. I’ll drop the repo in a comment for anyone who wants to poke at it. Curious what others do for this — especially: has anyone found a way to trust an agent’s self-reported “done” without an independent check? That problem shaped basically every design decision here. submitted by /u/BagPsychological1020
Originally posted by u/BagPsychological1020 on r/ClaudeCode