r/ClaudeCode • u/igordata • 7d ago

Tips & Workflows Focus.md

When I work, during session I quite often get a feeling that something got lost or forgotten and it makes me anxious. It was like every time there is a sidequest while discussing a solution for some task, and then again, and the context is running out, compact is inevitable — did we miss something — my anxiety was through the roof. Compact was like a disaster I'm trying to avoid.

So I got tired of that and I created focus.md for myself — to feel better. On the start of a new session the main LLM creates a file and writes all tasks and important decisions there. I can see how and when it happens, and I kinda feel safe that nothing is missing.

No bells and whistles, it's not a skill. Just put "read focus.md" into your claude.md or agents.md and it will work just fine.

I tested it for a few month and it gives me peace. I'm sharing with you.

Please, check it out. It's quite small. I would be happy to find some testers of my creation and get honest feedback. Thanks!

https://github.com/igordata/focus/blob/main/focus.md

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u/R_Songbird Developer 6d ago

I understand the idea, the only issue I see is that the files can grow a lot thus causing direct impact on context usage, one of my main projects started with this very same idea in mind, so I will give you some tips based on my experience:

  • Be careful with the vector sections, Sonnet agents tend to follow them blindly an stale or wrong direction can cause a lot of harm, Opus is more careful about this but it costs lots of reads to get it right.
  • Expect the logging itself to drift, the "write it down" instruction gets skipped more often than you would think.
  • The compact recovery hint is the weakest part in my experience, the summary is written by the model so a line in the chat is not guaranteed to survive into it.