Memory Integration

The problem

Every Claude session starts fresh. You might have discussed preferences, made decisions, or worked through problems — but next session, Claude doesn’t know any of that.

For quick tasks, this is fine. But sometimes you want Claude to remember:

• “What approach did we decide on for organizing my files?”
• “How did we handle that tricky email last month?”
• “What were the options we discussed for the trip?”

Claude Memory

Claude Memory is a tool that indexes your past conversations and lets you search them.

claude-memory search "trip planning options"

Returns relevant conversation snippets with context about when and what was discussed.

How it works

1. Indexing — Your conversations are processed and stored
2. Search — You (or Claude) can search for relevant past discussions
3. Context — Results come back with enough context to be useful

It’s like being able to search your own history of working with Claude.

Setup

# Install
pip install claude-memory

# Configure (point to where your conversations are stored)
claude-memory config --conversations-path ~/.claude/projects

# Build the initial index
claude-memory sync

Making Claude use it

Add memory search to your CLAUDE.md so Claude checks it automatically:

## Claude Memory

Search past conversations: `claude-memory search "query"`

Use when:
- I ask "what did we discuss about X?"
- Before making decisions that might have prior context
- When I reference past work

Now Claude will search your history when it might help, without you asking.

When memory helps

Finding past decisions:

claude-memory search "decided to use the simple approach"

Recalling how you did something:

claude-memory search "how we organized the photos"

Getting context back:

claude-memory search "why we chose that format"

What memory doesn’t do

• It’s not automatic recall — Claude doesn’t search before every response
• It’s not perfect — Search can miss relevant content or surface irrelevant content
• It’s not a database — Better for “vibe search” than exact lookups

Use memory as a tool, not a crutch. The best context is still explicit, current, and in CLAUDE.md.

For developers

Memory becomes especially useful for long-running projects:

• “What approach did we decide on for caching?”
• “How did we handle auth in that other project?”
• “What were the tradeoffs we discussed for the database schema?”

Search patterns

# Finding architectural decisions
claude-memory search "decided to use postgres instead of"

# Finding implementations
claude-memory search "how we implemented rate limiting"

# Finding rationale
claude-memory search "why we chose this approach for auth"

The Memory Visualizer

A 3D visualization of your conversation embeddings. Lets you see clusters of related conversations, navigate through time, and find patterns in what you discuss. Useful for understanding what knowledge exists in your history.