8.1
Three Levels Of Recall
Why this exists
Back in 2.2 you learned it doesn't remember, and clearing a session wipes everything. In 2.4 you learned the two ways round that — put it in front of it, or let it look things up.
Now you've been working for seven weeks and you've accumulated things worth keeping: your never-touch list, your triage rules, your daily loop, what normal looks like. This level is about where that lives so it's still there in six months.
The idea
Three levels, and the question is always the same: how long does this need to survive?
| Level | Lives | Survives |
|---|---|---|
| Context | This conversation | Until you clear it |
| Project | Files in the folder | As long as the project does |
| Durable | Your own store, outside any project | Everything |
Context is what you're talking about right now. Fast, free, gone the moment you clear. Correct for anything about the immediate task.
Project is the CLAUDE.md and CONTEXT.md files from Level 3. Anything true about this system — its structure, its conventions, its never-touch list — belongs here, because it's useful to anyone who opens the project, including you in three months.
Durable is the level most people never build. Knowledge that isn't about one project: how you triage, what you've learned, why a decision was made, how something works that spans several systems. It has no project to live in, so unless there's somewhere for it, it stays in your head — and that's exactly the failure this whole job exists to fix.
The test is one question: who needs this, and when?
| If it's... | It goes... |
|---|---|
| Only relevant to this conversation | Context. Let it go. |
| True about this system | Project. A file in the repo. |
| True about how you work, or spans systems | Durable |
| Something you'd want if you got hit by a bus | Durable, and tell someone |
The common mistake is putting durable knowledge in context. You work something out in a session — why a thing behaves oddly, what the fix actually was — and it feels captured because you understand it now. Then you clear the session and it's gone, and you work it out again in five weeks.
Anything you've worked out twice belongs at the durable level. That's the same rule as 6.9 turning repeated manual checks into monitoring, applied to knowledge instead of tasks.
Do
- List ten things you know now that you didn't eight weeks ago. Be specific — not "how Claude Code works" but "that clearing a session doesn't touch the files."
- Put each at a level: context, project, or durable.
- Anything durable — where is it right now? For most, the honest answer is "my head" or "a session I've since cleared."
- Look through your artifacts from Levels 6 and 7 —
never-touch.md,triage.md,daily-loop.md,automation.md. Which are project-level and which are durable? - Note that several are durable but currently sitting in a project folder. That's fine for now and it's a problem when the project changes.
- Write
memory-map.md: the three levels, what belongs at each for your work, and where your durable knowledge currently lives. - Finish with a list of things you've worked out more than once. Those are the highest-value durable candidates.
Step 7 is the useful one. Anything you've solved twice you'll solve a third time unless it's written somewhere that outlives a session.
Done when
Never do
Don't leave durable knowledge in a session. It feels captured because you understand it. Understanding is not storage, and clearing the session proves it.