There are plenty of guides floating around on how to give AI agents long-term memory, but I’m not an engineer and most of them either went over my head or felt like overkill for a side project. So I kept looking for something I could actually set up myself.

I started with Andrej Karpathy’s recent post about giving an agent a kind of wiki. The idea, as I understood it, is that you give the model two folders to read alongside whatever you’re working on. One folder holds raw source material, meaning your own words, transcripts, things you’ve written, and it never changes. The other is a folder the model can edit, where it keeps a running summary of what’s true about the project right now. You then add a short protocol telling the model to read the summaries at the start of every session and update them at the end. That was the whole idea, just two folders and a rule.

I spent Saturday setting that up for Saalo. I called the summary folder a “cortex” because calling it a wiki made me think of Wikipedia and that didn’t feel right. I added a one-page file answering the question “where is Saalo right now” across the app, the website, the hardware, and the Substack, along with a few pages for each of those areas. I also set up a log that Claude appends to at the end of every session, one line per session, so I can scan what’s happened without re-reading anything.

The most useful thing I did all day was ask Claude to go back and read every past Cowork task I’d ever done on Saalo and write a short note on each one, covering what I was working on, what actually worked, and where things had gotten stuck. There’s a tool inside Cowork that can pull up past tasks, and in a couple of hours I had a folder of notes covering months of weekend work that I’d otherwise have forgotten.

If you want to try this yourself

The setup has two folders: one for raw source material you maintain yourself (your own writing, transcripts, anything you’ve published), and one where the AI keeps a running summary of where the project is right now. The AI reads the summary at the start of every session and updates it at the end.

A few things to keep in mind. The raw folder needs to stay untouchable by the AI, or else your own convictions quietly get paraphrased back to you and you stop being able to tell the original from the summary. The AI also cannot be the source of anything in that folder. If it writes a summary of something you said, and then later pulls from that summary as if it were primary, the truth drifts pretty quickly. And resist the urge to design an elaborate structure up front. Start with one summary page and add more pages only when you catch yourself re-explaining the same thing across different sessions.

If you’ve got any history of past chats or sessions sitting around, it’s also worth having the AI go back and write a short note on each one before you move forward. You’ll be surprised how much of your own work is already in there.

If you want a shortcut, here’s a prompt you can paste into Claude or another AI tool to get this set up without building it all by hand. It’ll interview you first, then do the setup based on your answers.

I want to set up a simple knowledge system for a project I’m working on with you, so that you can hold context across our sessions instead of starting from zero every time we talk.

The setup is two folders. The first is for raw source material that only I edit, meaning my own writing, transcripts, and anything I’ve already published. The second is a living summary that you maintain, describing where the project stands right now. You read the summary at the start of every session and update it at the end.

Before we build this, please ask me five or six questions, one at a time, so you have the context to set it up well. Things you’d probably want to know: what the project is, what AI tool I’m using you in, where the folders should live on my computer, what areas or domains the project spans, and what source material I already have that could seed the raw folder.

Once I’ve answered, create the two folders and seed the summary folder with a one-page file answering “where is this project at right now” in my own words based on what I’ve told you. Also create a log.md file inside that folder that we’ll use as an append-only record of what changes over time.

Then write me a short instruction I can paste into your project settings so you’ll follow this routine in every future session: at the start, read the summary folder for context. At the end, update any summary pages whose claims have changed, add a dated line to log.md summarizing what we did, and create new pages for any new concepts or areas that came up during the session. If I tell you about something that affects more than one page, check the related pages and update those too.

Two rules to hold onto. Never edit the raw folder, it’s read-only from your side. And if at any point I say something that should live in the raw folder, tell me to paste it in myself instead of transcribing it yourself.

Honestly, this post is sort of a test of the whole thing. I asked Claude for a Substack draft using one line (”write me a post about the cortex we built Saturday”) and let everything else come from the folder we set up. How well it worked probably depends on how much I had to rewrite.

If you give something like this a try, let me know how it goes. If you’ve already figured out an approach that works better for keeping Claude or another AI agent on the same page across sessions, or just have tips of your own, I’d love to hear them. And if this kind of post is useful to you, subscribing would mean a lot. I’ll keep sharing what I’m picking up as I build Saalo.

Saalo is an app that tracks the time you spend away from your phone. I’m also building a Saalo box that automatically logs that time.

The idea is simple. Unlike screentime, which tracks the amount of time you’re looking at your phone, Saalo tracks the time you create the intention to put your phone away, and actually do it.

Like many people, I’ve struggled with this, and I’m looking for a solution. So now I’m creating one.

I’m not a developer and I’ve never built hardware. So I’m learning as I go, using Claude as a helper. Whether it’s building an iOS app, designing a printed circuit board, or filing for patents, I’m stumbling my way through it and want to share some of the practical lessons I’m learning.

The publication is called Creating Saalo for two reasons. I want to learn how to create the time and space away from my phone. And I want to learn how to create a product to help with that. Both are acts that don’t happen on their own. Both reward patience and presence.

So there are two sections to this: Life and Work.

Life is reflections on intention, attention, technology, presence. It’s the territory Saalo is made for. Some posts expand the answers on /questions at saalo.co. Some arise from my own experience. I want to explore how to be more present in a world constantly filled with more distractions, so I can focus on what matters most.

Work is a notebook of what and how I’m building. Mainly lessons learned around how to prioritize, how to learn, what Claude is good at, and what it isn’t. There are too many blogs out there on how to set up AI. I haven’t found many on how to put it into practice. This is about practical ways I’m using it, and what’s working. If you’ve wondered what someone without an engineering background, and without much spare time, can actually build with modern AI tools, this is my attempt at an honest answer, week by week.

If you want only Work or only Life, you can pick which. If you want both, welcome aboard.

Thanks for being here.

Tommy