Session Reflection

Capture what you learned this session into persistent memory.

When to Use

Run /reflect at the end of a productive session — especially when:

• You corrected Claude's approach or preferences
• You hit a tricky bug and found the root cause
• You established or discovered project conventions
• You repeated a workflow pattern multiple times

Skip for quick sessions or trivial changes.

1. Scan the Session

Review the conversation history. Look for four categories:

Corrections (highest signal)

• Times the user redirected your approach
• Suggestions the user rejected and what they wanted instead
• Explicit preferences ("always do X", "never do Y")

Debugging Insights

• Root causes that weren't obvious from the error
• Framework gotchas or environment quirks
• Diagnostic sequences that worked

Patterns

• Repeated workflows worth codifying
• File organization or naming conventions
• Tool preferences or configurations

Conventions

• Architectural patterns found in the codebase
• Implicit project rules not documented elsewhere
• Integration patterns between services

2. Filter Ruthlessly

Each candidate must pass ALL four checks:

1. Stable? — Will this recur? One-off decisions don't need memory.
2. Already documented? — Check CLAUDE.md, existing memory files, project docs. Don't duplicate.
3. Actionable? — "The API is complex" is useless. "Always pass X header when calling Y endpoint" is useful.
4. Project-scoped? — The memory store is per-project. If a finding applies to all projects (a user preference, a general workflow lesson), still record it here — note the broader scope in the entry so it can be promoted later.

Discard anything that fails any check.

3. Bridge to Project Context

After filtering, do a second pass on the surviving findings. Ask: "Is this finding project-structural?"

A finding is project-structural if it describes:

• An architectural decision or tradeoff (→ decisions.md)
• A naming, file organization, or error handling convention (→ conventions.md)
• A reusable structural pattern (→ patterns/)

For any project-structural findings, check if .claude/context/ exists:

If the scaffold exists: Propose writing them with the remember skill's format — read the installed remember skill (.claude/skills/remember/SKILL.md, or skills/remember/SKILL.md in the repo) for its classify → format → write steps rather than guessing the scaffold format. Present each one:

**Context type:** Decision | Convention | Pattern
**Target:** .claude/context/<file>
**Entry:**
> [The formatted entry text]

Group these separately from session memory proposals (Step 4). The user approves context writes independently from memory writes.

If the scaffold doesn't exist: Skip this step. Mention that /intel can generate the scaffold if the user wants to persist project-level findings.

Non-structural findings (personal preferences, debugging tricks, tool configurations) stay in session memory only — continue to Step 4 for those.

4. Propose Session Memory Updates

For each surviving finding, present:

**Type:** User | Feedback | Project | Reference
**File:** <memory file slug — one fact per file, e.g. git-commit-style.md>
**Action:** Add | Update | Remove

> The exact text to write

**Evidence:** What happened in the session that produced this

Pick Type using the same taxonomy as Memory Organization below. Group by type, then by file.

5. Write Approved Changes

Only write what the user explicitly approves.

Project context entries (from Step 3): Follow the installed remember skill (.claude/skills/remember/SKILL.md, or skills/remember/SKILL.md in the repo) — its classify → deduplicate → format → write process is the single source of truth for context-scaffold entries. Don't re-derive the format here.

Session memory entries (from Step 4):

1. Write each approved finding to its own file in the memory store, with the name/description/metadata frontmatter from Memory Organization (create the file — don't append into an unrelated one)
2. Add a one-line pointer to it in MEMORY.md
3. If a memory file already covers the topic, update or replace it rather than adding a duplicate

Memory Organization

Session memory lives in the harness's per-project auto-memory store: ~/.claude/projects/<project-path>/memory/. The convention is one fact per file, each file carrying frontmatter:

---
name: {short-kebab-slug}
description: {one-line summary — this is what future sessions scan to judge relevance}
metadata:
  type: {user | feedback | project | reference}
---

{The memory itself — a few lines. Link related memories with [[other-slug]].}

Pick type by what the finding is: a fact or preference about the user → user; guidance on how to work, or a correction → feedback; state about the current work → project; a pointer to where information lives elsewhere → reference.

MEMORY.md is the index, not a store: one pointer line per memory file (- [Title](file.md) — one-line hook), no frontmatter, kept short (it is always loaded into context, and lines past ~200 are truncated). Never write memory content directly into MEMORY.md.

Organize by topic, not by date. When a finding supersedes an earlier one, update or remove that memory file instead of appending a contradiction.

What NOT to Save

• Session-specific context (current task, temporary state)
• Information already in CLAUDE.md or project docs
• Speculative conclusions from limited evidence
• Generic best practices any developer would know
• Anything that contradicts established project conventions