Feedback: no shared state across Claude surfaces/sessions; long conversations also degrade

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Problem Statement

Area: Cross-session / cross-surface continuity; long-context durability

Summary

Claude has no shared point of contact or shared state across its surfaces — Claude Code (CLI), the browser extension, claude.ai chats, and separate projects. Each session is isolated and cannot see the others. For multi-step tasks that unfold over time, this forces the user to be the only memory and the only coordinator — exactly when help is most needed.

What happens in practice

• A task gets split across multiple sessions/surfaces that can't see each other's work.
• Two sessions can edit the same files/workspace at once, producing conflicting actions and duplicate outputs, with no awareness another session is active.
• A fresh session has no idea what prior sessions already produced, so it rediscovers or contradicts earlier work.

Related: single long conversations also degrade

The context window is finite, so long/involved chats get compacted and earlier details quietly drop out (decisions, file paths, naming, caveats). The user experiences this as "forgetting" or losing the thread — and it hits hardest on the long, multi-step tasks that span the most tokens.

Requested improvements

1. Shared, persistent project memory any surface can read/write — one source of truth, not silos.
2. Awareness of other active sessions on the same workspace, with a soft lock to prevent simultaneous conflicting edits.
3. An auto-maintained project state/index so a new session sees what exists and what's been done.
4. Continuity across Code / extension / chats / projects referencing the same context.
5. Within a session: checkpoint important state to durable storage before compaction, warn as context fills, and keep a decisions/artifacts ledger that survives summarization.

Severity: High for anyone doing real, multi-piece work. Per-session capability is strong; the gap is coordination across sessions/surfaces and durability within a long session.

Proposed Solution

See requested improvements in Problem Statement above:

1. Shared, persistent project memory any surface can read/write — one source of truth, not silos.
2. 2. Awareness of other active sessions on the same workspace, with a soft lock to prevent simultaneous conflicting edits.
3. 3. An auto-maintained project state/index so a new session sees what exists and what's been done.
4. 4. Continuity across Code / extension / chats / projects referencing the same context.
5. 5. Within a session: checkpoint important state to durable storage before compaction, warn as context fills, and keep a decisions/artifacts ledger that survives summarization.

Alternative Solutions

Currently the only workarounds are manual and burdensome: copy-pasting relevant context into each new session by hand, maintaining a CLAUDE.md file as a makeshift shared memory, or keeping external notes/docs to track decisions and file state across sessions. None of these scale for real multi-step work.

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Other

Use Case Example

1. I start a Claude Code session to build a new feature — it produces files, makes decisions about naming and structure, and gets partway through.
2. 2. The session hits context limits and I have to start a new one.
3. 3. The new session has no idea what the previous one did — it rediscovers the codebase from scratch, may contradict earlier naming decisions, or duplicates work already done.
4. 4. Separately, I open a claude.ai chat to think through the architecture. That chat cannot see what Claude Code already built.
5. 5. If I accidentally run two Claude Code sessions on the same workspace, they edit the same files simultaneously with no awareness of each other, producing conflicts.
6. 6. At every step, I am the only coordinator — manually summarizing prior work into each new session just to keep things coherent.

Additional Context

_No response_