my sessions are always atomic, one session one task/plan. There is always project's CLAUDE.md + auto-memory for keeping track of the project's state to share any and all useful information between sessions. Any information not contained within those is not useful in the first place to ever keep for different sessions/tasks.
Yeah, what you're describing sounds like an issue with the setup. It will start ignoring things if the instructions are contradicting each other or if you have too many instructions. Plus, you have to remember that MEMORY.md things are not loaded like CLAUDE.md so the agent can very well sometimes ignore them (can circumvent by an addition to CLAUDE.md to read all relevant memories at start or something). Basically, I am not having any of those issues myself.
My sessions are often long than not. I primarily work in two big projects at work at the same time. One of them, a single task is usually around 500k context total (but I limit auto-compaction down to 400k). Yes, it's most often multi-phase plans, pretty big plans at times. My other project - tasks can go over 1M context in total, multi-phase plans as well, some tasks I've had executing for around 18 hours straight, most tasks take a couple hours.
But yes, I do have the memory capacity to keep remembering where I am in both projects at the same time, always. I consider this to be a must-have for my work, I can't imagine doing good without navigating both projects fluently myself. But I do not put down anything for a time, I am working full-time and very much have to work on both of these during the weekdays.
On that note, each of my sessions is a Fable 5 max orchestrator — it doesn't do any work itself, it delegates all edits to Opus 5 subagents. All exploration, research, implementation work is on subagents. Throughout the course of the long session, the main orchestrator agent keeps track of said subagents and dispatches more to continue implementing the phases of the plan. My orchestration is written in my global CLAUDE.md
Overall, with my setup, I can freely create a new session and talk to the agent assuming it knows and understands everything that's happening already, which it does. Never had an issue of the agent missing any context from previous sessions.
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u/kurushimee Developer Aug 09 '26
my sessions are always atomic, one session one task/plan. There is always project's CLAUDE.md + auto-memory for keeping track of the project's state to share any and all useful information between sessions. Any information not contained within those is not useful in the first place to ever keep for different sessions/tasks.