Project memory

Skill martian56/claude-engineer/plugins/claude-engineer/skills/project-memory

Claude Code marketplace and home of claude-engineer: an opinionated, design-system-first, plan-gated autonomous engineer for full greenfield React/Next and FastAPI projects.

Install

npx -y skills add martian56/claude-engineer --skill project-memory

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use to create and maintain durable cross-session project memory and the progress ledger, so long autonomous builds resume cleanly after compaction, restarts, or new sessions. Read it when starting work and update it as decisions and tasks land.

SKILL.md

2.2 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Project Memory

Announce at start: "I'm using claude-engineer:project-memory to keep durable project state."

Long autonomous builds outlive a single context window. Memory lives in files, not your head. The claude-engineer SessionStart hook auto-loads these at the start of every session.

The state files (in `.claude-engineer/`)

memory.md - durable project memory: key decisions (+ why), established conventions, the data model, open threads/risks, and "next action". The single source of truth for why things are the way they are.
progress.md - the task ledger: each task with status (todo / doing / done), the commit/branch, and a one-line result. Append-only-ish; never delete history.
current-phase.txt - one line naming the active phase (e.g. Phase 2 - Frontend).
quality-gate-status.json - written by the project quality-gate runner; read by the commit gate. Do not hand-edit.

Iron Law

Trust the ledger and git log over your own recollection. After compaction, re-read these files before acting. Never re-run a task progress.md marks done.

When to update

After every task: append a line to progress.md.
On every non-obvious decision: add it to memory.md (mirror big ones into docs/plan/decisions.md).
On phase change: update current-phase.txt.

Initialize (Phase 0 / planning)

Create .claude-engineer/ with seed memory.md (problem, stack, data model, decisions-so-far, next action), an empty progress.md ledger, and current-phase.txt. Add .claude-engineer/quality-gate-status.json to .gitignore (machine-generated); commit memory.md/progress.md so teammates and future sessions share them.

Red flags - STOP

Starting work without reading memory.md + progress.md first.
A decision made in chat but never written down → write it now; chat is not durable.
Re-deriving something already settled in memory.md.