Switching apps constantly breaks my flow
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Jumped from a brainstorming session on one app over to a coding assistant, only to realize I had to retype my entire setup from scratch. It feels like every app lives in its own tiny island, completely unaware of what I was doing two seconds ago.
Right now my fix is keeping a sticky note full of custom settings open on my screen, but it gets annoying copying stuff all day long.
Curious how everyone else handles this. Do you just start fresh every time, or do you have a cool shortcut to keep your notes consistent?
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same here, i keep a plain txt file with the repeating context and just paste it in each time, not elegant but it works
The sticky note method is way too relatable 😂 We need a better solution than manually carrying our brains between tools.
I keep reusable prompts for exactly this reason, but honestly, even that feels like a workaround. Apps should be smart enough to pick up the context without making us repeat everything.
Put the context in a file the tools read on their own.
Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md, a lot of the others read AGENTS.md. I keep everything in AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md is a one-line pointer to it, so every tool loads the same rules without me pasting anything. Rules I'd retype every session, like "use bun, not npm", live there once.
Where it doesn't help: the brainstorming side. A chat app has no idea your repo exists, so for that hop I still copy the result over by hand. I just keep it short, the decision and not the whole conversation.
Roman, the sticky-note of custom settings is painfully familiar when you bounce between a brainstorming app and a coding assistant :) Do you keep one shared note of decisions only, or a separate snippet per app so the coding assistant doesn't get brainstorming fluff?
Part of my fix was picking a coding agent that reads the rule files other tools already wrote: AGENTS.md, Cursor rules, Cline rules. One set of notes in the repo, read by whichever tool I open. For memory across sessions, it keeps its own searchable store, so I stopped re-explaining my setup.
Mid-task an agent lost earlier context and rebuilt a helper that already existed two files away under a different name. Tracking down that kind of silent duplicate logic breaks concentration far worse than toggling windows ever did.
I stopped carrying context by hand. There's one global CLAUDE.md every project follows, plus one per project, and shared docs for coding standards, database, email, security and UI are linked into every project. So whichever session I open, it reads the same things. Whatever comes up mid-work goes into a memory folder per project that gets loaded at the start.