Cross-session memory via shell snippets in global CLAUDE.md

Claude Code stores every session as a ~/.claude/projects/<project-slug>/<session-id>.jsonl file, but the agent has no awareness of those files unless you tell it. Adding three bash recipes to the global claude.md — list recent sessions, grep sessions by keyword, dump a specific session's dialog — gives any new conversation the ability to recall prior ones on demand. "This was an outright breakthrough" for cross-project memory.

Replaces ad-hoc docs/ folder maintenance: instead of writing handover notes between sessions, you let Claude grep its own history. The native /insights command shipped later covers part of this use case (pattern extraction), but the raw-grep recipe is still the right tool when you need to recall a specific conversation, not a synthesized pattern.

1. Open your user-level ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (or project-level CLAUDE.md, depending on scope).
2. Add a section with the three snippets below — list-recent, grep-by-keyword, read-specific-session. Replace the path template with your username and project name (use dashes, not slashes).
3. Save. Open a new Claude Code session; the agent now has the recipes in context.
4. Ask: "list my last 10 sessions on this project" or "grep my sessions for redis" — Claude runs the bash and returns hits.
5. Drill into a specific session: "read session abc-123 and summarize what we decided about caching."

# Project sessions directory (replace USER_NAME, PROJECT_NAME; use dashes)
SESSION_DIR=~/.claude/projects/-Users-USER_NAME-Developer-PROJECT_NAME

# 1. List recent sessions with a first-message preview
for f in $(ls -t "$SESSION_DIR"/*.jsonl 2>/dev/null | head -15); do
 echo "=== $f ==="
 head -1 "$f"
done

# 2. Search sessions by keyword
grep -l "redis" "$SESSION_DIR"/*.jsonl

# 3. Dump a specific session's dialog
cat "$SESSION_DIR/SESSION_ID.jsonl" \
 | python3 -c "import sys, json; [print(json.loads(l).get('content','')) for l in sys.stdin]"

Session files balloon: a heavy CC user accumulates GB of .jsonl in ~/.claude/projects/ within months. The grep snippet works fine; the dialog-dump snippet on a huge session will burn context fast. Use it on the smallest matching session, not on the whole project. Also: if you migrate machines, copy ~/.claude/projects/ along with everything else — that's where your cross-session memory actually lives.