Agentic Coding #6 — Zettelkasten as Memory

Intermediate Results and the Zettelkasten as Memory

Whenever something comes up during implementation — new insights, work steps that need to be remembered, new requirements — these are immediately transferred into appropriate Obsidian documents. Direct access to the Gitea server is helpful for this, because documents can be written directly into the repository and are thus practically synchronized automatically.

Work is of course done primarily through the filesystem, but this has the disadvantage that one sometimes forgets to commit the Zettelkasten at the end. All these intermediate ideas and notes that arise during the course of implementation must be captured so that one can continue at a later point in time on a different machine with Claude Code in a new session, and Claude knows where things stand and what has come up.

This is precisely the second function of the Zettelkasten: It serves not only as project management but also as long-term memory for Claude. Claude does have its own internal memory, but the overarching, long-term memory that the user also has influence over is the Zettelkasten.

Things that Claude should remember end up, for example, in the RAM area of the vault — that is the working memory. There are also skills that access this specifically, so that one can tell Claude: Check what happened last time. Look at what was there, show me everything we noted down. Then you get a list and can say: This one here, activate that and do it the same way. Or: Modify that in such and such a way.

The CLAUDE.md does contain references to the Zettelkasten, and Claude does write all sorts of things into it — that is permitted — but it is not the decisive element. The decisive element is the Zettelkasten itself. It builds a flexible context that persists across sessions, machines, and time.