I SOLVED Claude Code forgetting what it was building

Deep in a session, right when I understood the work best, I wrote down what to build next as a short structured capsule. Then I cleared the context. A fresh session with none of that understanding read the capsule cold and built it to spec. It did not know it was finishing its own work.

Handoff notes fail two ways: they ROT (you forget) or they CANNOT TRAVEL (a fresh session can't read your mind). And terse notes silently drop the two things that matter most: WHERE the work goes and what DONE looks like. I measured it. Labeled-field capsules scored 10/10 on intent fidelity vs terse prose at 9.67, and prose's weakest spots were exactly WHERE and ACCEPTANCE.

The honest part: the model still ran ~31% of malformed input instead of refusing it, so that check is deterministic code, not a model call. It understands the capsule. It does not get to decide the capsule is safe.

Free CLI and Claude Code plugin, MIT. Try authoring one capsule next time you are deep in something, then clear and let a fresh session build it.

github.com/gtsbahamas/intent-capsule

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