Life Admin on Joey Gennari | Blog

What Claude Remembers

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:15:05 -0400

The first post talked about the journal and check-in loop. The second talked about skills — markdown files Claude reads to know what to do. This last one is about how Claude remembers things across sessions.

Claude Code ships with a feature called auto-memory: a small filesystem of facts the model can write to and read from, scoped to a project. When I correct Claude (“stop appending ‘Sent by Claude’ to my texts”), that becomes a memory file. When I confirm a non-obvious decision (“yes, the bundled PR was the right call”), that’s also a memory. Anything I wouldn’t want to repeat to a fresh session — preferences, project context, pointers to where things live — goes there.

Skills Are Just Markdown

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:17:47 -0400

The first post in this series talked about /journal and /checkin — a daily journal and a 15-minute check-in loop that runs unattended on a schedule. I called them “skills” without explaining what that means. This post is about the mechanism.

A skill is a markdown file. That’s the whole abstraction.

Specifically: a directory under .claude/skills/<name>/ with a SKILL.md inside. The directory name is the slash command. The contents of SKILL.md are the instructions Claude reads when you invoke it. There’s no plugin API, no shell wrapper, no “register your command.” Drop a directory in, the command exists. Edit the file, the behavior changes.

My Life Runs in a Markdown File

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:36:21 -0400

I have a Claude Code-powered personal assistant that runs on a schedule. It reads my email, my calendar, my texts, the kids’ school calendar, my plant care schedule, the weather, and my custody plan. It writes the day to a markdown file every morning and updates that file every 15 minutes throughout the work day. Most of the time it doesn’t tell me anything — that’s the point.

The whole thing lives in a git repo I call life/. About 6,000 lines of markdown, a handful of shell scripts, 17 slash commands. Here’s a partial list of what it does in a normal week, all without me asking: