How I stopped being the message bus between my Claude chats

For a month my job was carrying text between chats: copy the plan out of one, paste it into the next, then check whether the second one actually did it.

The template I ended up with splits the work this way.

- One session at the root plans and dispatches. It's the only one I talk to about priorities.

- Each worker (content, design, an assistant) lives in its own folder with its own CLAUDE.md, CONTEXT.md and STATUS.md.

- Workers never read each other's files. Every handoff is a brief, written so a cold session can pick it up with no chat history, and every brief lands in one briefs folder.

- STATUS.md is the first thing a worker reads at the start of a session and the last thing it writes at the end. That's how I know a dispatch landed without asking.

It ships with four hooks: one asks before rm -rf or a force-push, one snapshots high-risk files at the start of the day, one bumps a "Last updated" date when a tracker changes, and one asks before editing a file that's been handed off. It also has a weekly and monthly clean-up routine, so the folders don't silt up.

It carries the structure only, none of my brand. You run a builder routine that fills in your voice and visual rules, then dispatch your first brief.

The layers follow Jake Van Clief's ICM: what loads every session, what routes, what gets read on demand.

Try it yourself: count how many times today you pasted one chat's output into another. Each one is a handoff that could be a file.

Question for the comments: what's the handoff you still carry by hand most often?

Free, MIT, nothing to sign up for: https://github.com/NFTYoginis/agency-of-one

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How I stopped being the message bus between my Claude chats