Problem
By summer 2026 I had a shared fiction project with a writing partner, two university courses, a PC that kept crashing, and a job search, all run through chat sessions that forgot everything between one day and the next. Each session started with me re-explaining the project. Rules I'd set got dropped. Scenes lived in three places.
Role
Owner and author. I decided what the system had to do and what it must never do, and ruled on every convention. Claude Code wrote the scripts and the first drafts of the rule files against those rulings, and I corrected them in review. My writing partner reads the result and didn't build it.
What I built
One folder tree, one rule per level. A root file says how any session starts: load the style guide, work out which project is active from what I said, read that project's tasklist. Each project folder has its own short file that adds only what's specific to it. Nothing is restated downward; if a rule changes, it changes in one place.
Sessions. Every working session ends with a log: what changed, what's open, what went wrong. 93 of them since 08/25/2026. The next session reads the newest one before touching anything, so the direction carries across days without me retyping it. Logs are never edited after the fact; a correction goes in the next one.
Skills. Repeatable procedures live as skill files the model loads on a trigger: the style guide (its own case study on this site), a wrap procedure that writes the log and reconciles the tasklist, an import-and-submit procedure for coursework, manuscript and screenplay formatting, a linter for dead references. 7 in all, each written as a checklist a stranger could follow.
Tasklists. Every project keeps one file in five tiers (active, waiting, pending, deferred, closed), one line per item, reconciled at every wrap. It is the only place an open item is allowed to live.
The hub. The fiction folder builds into a private website on every push: 9 characters, 148 scenes, the setting files, and a word-processor page where my partner and I draft and edit the same scene at the same time. Dark, one typeface, no helper text. This portfolio uses the same tokens.
Limits
It's a system for one writer and one partner; nothing about it is multi-tenant or general. The model still produces machine-sounding drafts, which is why the style guide exists. And the logs only work if every session ends properly.
Result
A session now starts with the right context loaded, and a change made in one project (a spelling ruling, a filename rule) holds in every other one. One course has run through it end to end, with every brief, rubric, draft, and frozen submission in place, and a second is running now. The job search runs through it too, including a scheduled digest that lands in my inbox three mornings a week.