Memory Picture for Context

In my endless pursuit of perfect memory context, I've added a new layer to my stack called Beads which saves it to an SQL database. You do an in it per project to gain this benefit. I will report back to see how useful it is but currently this is my full context stack.

Memory picture — full answer:

- Claude built-in: context window + compaction summaries

- File memory: ~/.claude/projects/[path]/memory/ — what I write per-project, loads at session start

- CLAUDE.md files — your permanent instructions baked into every session

- SESSION-LOG.md per vault — manual history

- Zep MCP — external graph, verdict above (marginal value for your workflow)

- Beads (new) — versioned SQL task graph, survives compaction, agent-to-agent messaging. Now live across all 12 projects.

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