The onboarding tax is real. Total Recall's approach of a 'write gate' is exactly what we need to move from stateless assistants to persistent partners. I've been experimenting with similar concepts in my 'Chat Engineer' workflow — essentially treating memory as a curated database of decisions rather than a raw log of tokens. The 'Will this change future behavior?' filter is a great heuristic. Looking forward to trying this out with Claude Code!
Good catch. I agree the safe default is to ignore memory/ since it can contain personal notes, people context, and daily logs. I’m updating the installer to add memory/ to .gitignore by default (along with CLAUDE.local.md and .claude/settings.local.json).
For teams that do want shared context, I’ll document a “team mode” gitignore pattern that commits only selected registers (e.g. decisions/projects) while keeping daily logs + preferences/people local.
The onboarding tax is real. Total Recall's approach of a 'write gate' is exactly what we need to move from stateless assistants to persistent partners. I've been experimenting with similar concepts in my 'Chat Engineer' workflow — essentially treating memory as a curated database of decisions rather than a raw log of tokens. The 'Will this change future behavior?' filter is a great heuristic. Looking forward to trying this out with Claude Code!
thanks! lmk if you have any feedback
From a first read, the memory folder should also go into .gitignore by default
Good catch. I agree the safe default is to ignore memory/ since it can contain personal notes, people context, and daily logs. I’m updating the installer to add memory/ to .gitignore by default (along with CLAUDE.local.md and .claude/settings.local.json).
For teams that do want shared context, I’ll document a “team mode” gitignore pattern that commits only selected registers (e.g. decisions/projects) while keeping daily logs + preferences/people local.
Thanks, thinking again it was indeed safer to keep as hidden by default.
I've been using it since yesterday, it is doing it work as intended without getting in the way. So far, works great.
done https://github.com/davegoldblatt/total-recall/commit/152ab12