Session management: working with Claude across sessions
How the garden is tended across sessions: the backlog, handovers, and the editorial moment.
Each working session has a focused scope. The Claude Code session is the editorial moment: content is reviewed before it’s written to a file, diffs are reviewed before committing, and commits are reviewed before pushing. Nothing goes live without explicit sign-off.
The session structure
Sessions start with context loading: Claude reads the handover from the previous session, the backlog, and any relevant files. Sessions end with a handover.
A handover has two parts:
- Session close: what was done, what decisions were made, what was left open.
- Next session brief: what to pick up, what context to load, what to do first.
The /handover skill generates this. Each handover card includes a ready-to-paste opening message for the next session. The two parts are kept distinct: the session closing out writes its own close, and addresses the next session as a separate recipient.
The backlog
A flat list of items at .claude/backlog.md. Each entry has:
- A status: 🟡 ready, 🔵 in progress, 🟠parked, ✅ done, 🧊 stale
- A last-touched date
- An optional
blocker:field when something is waiting on a decision - A ready-to-paste opening message for the next session
The backlog is groomed regularly using /backlog, which scans for stale items, unresolved blockers, in-progress work that has drifted, and inbox notes from the tablet, then asks what to work on.
The inbox
src/content/_inbox/ holds a persistent running note written on the tablet (Samsung Notes). Each entry is date-stamped. At the start of every session, Claude checks for unprocessed entries and offers to turn them into posts or backlog items. The file is never deleted.
Persistent context
Two mechanisms carry context across sessions:
CLAUDE.md holds project-level instructions: architecture, preferences, content guidelines, and workflow rules. It’s version-controlled and loaded at the start of every session.
Memory (at .claude/memory/) stores accumulated preferences and feedback. Corrections (“don’t do X”) and confirmations (“yes, keep doing that”) are saved so they don’t need to be repeated.