I run my freelance work from one folder that Claude Code lives in. I call it my operating system, but really it’s just a bunch of text files and a few rules about where things go. After using it for a while, here’s what I’d copy and what I wouldn’t. The folder has a main instructions file that tells Claude what this place is and where things are. It has a few notes about me, my business and what I’m working on right now. It has a running list of decisions I’ve made, which I only add to and never rewrite. And it has 18 little shortcuts that I trigger by typing a slash, like one that screens job posts for me and one that writes up a summary when I end a session. Claude also keeps its own memory notes, about 70 of them. Each one is a single fact, like “this login runs out every 7 days and here’s how to fix it”. The best part by far has been the memory. I connect Google Sheets through a tool that loses its login about once a week. The first time it happened I lost a good chunk of time figuring it out. Now there’s a note with the exact steps, so Claude just fixes it. Anything that bites me twice gets written down once, and then it stops costing me time. Now the things that went wrong. First, the dollar sign. In one of my shortcuts I had prices written out, like $10/hr and $1,200. When I ran it with extra words after the command, Claude swapped those prices for my words. So $10/hr turned into “skill:/hr”. No error, no warning. My job scoring just got quietly worse and I only noticed because the scores looked off. The fix is to put a backslash before the dollar sign. Second, add-ons from the community. I installed a big pack of 274 helper agents that other people made. I read through them first. Nothing was bad, but one was set up to publish things without asking me and to schedule itself, and seven of them could run commands on my computer for no good reason. I changed those before I kept them. What I wouldn’t copy: the memory gets out of date. A note about a login or a number can be wrong a few days later, so I treat my notes as hints and check the real thing first. I haven’t found a good way to make old notes expire. How do you handle memory in your setup? One big file, lots of small notes, something else? And how do you stop old notes from misleading Claude? submitted by /u/tariqosmani
Originally posted by u/tariqosmani on r/ClaudeCode