The Tax You Don’t Notice My workspace CLAUDE.md was 210 lines. It loaded into every session, across every project, every time. That’s roughly 3,500 tokens of instructions Claude reads before I say a word. I never questioned it. The file grew over months. A gotcha here, a workflow pattern there, a rule I wrote after getting burned once. Each line made sense when it was added. In aggregate, it was mostly noise. ...
Something Was Missing I run a /start command at the beginning of every Claude Code session. It loads my memory bank: project brief, active context, tech context, system patterns. Four files, plus CLAUDE.md which Claude Code already loads automatically. The command has worked fine for months. Then I started a session with Sonnet 4.6 on low effort and noticed the output felt thin. I asked which files it had read. Two. Out of four. ...
The Loop, From the Outside My job is prompting. I run /start. I describe what I want. Claude works. I redirect when it goes wrong. I run /stop. That’s it. The code, the tests, the commits, the issue filing, the research — Claude does all of it. I’m not in there typing. I’m outside, watching outputs, steering. Which means the “I” that encounters friction isn’t me. It’s Claude. ...
I had 18 services running across two Raspberry Pis and a Chrome bookmarks folder full of different ports. Every few weeks I’d need one and end up clicking through bookmarks trying to remember which port was which. How I got here I use Claude Code on a couple of Raspberry Pis. Over the past few months I kept asking it to build me things — a performance report for Podly so I could see podcast processing stats visually. A SvelteKit spec browser so I could review generated codebase specifications and give Claude specific feedback. MOSAIC prototypes so I could compare three UI directions in browser tabs and pick one. Some were full apps, some were just a python3 server pointing at an HTML file. ...