Your daily rhythm — start of session, end of session
What this does. Gives you two short commands — one for the start of each working session, one for the end — that keep Claude in the loop on what you were doing yesterday, what’s still open, and what got done today. Together they give your AI workflow real continuity instead of every conversation starting from zero.
Why this matters
Without these, you sit down tomorrow and Claude has forgotten everything from today. You re-explain. You waste the first ten minutes orienting both yourself and the AI. The handover-to-yourself never happens, so half the half-finished threads just quietly die.
The pattern below fixes that. Open with /session-start. Close with /document. That’s it.
Behind the scenes — the canonical skills. When you run /session-start or /document, Claude reads the skill source from ~/.claude/skills/<skill>/SKILL.md on your machine and follows it step-by-step. That’s where the iterative discipline lives — the briefing structure, the handover format, which files get read and in what order. Browse the rendered sources on GitHub (requires you to be signed in to your marinemegafauna account):
Run /install-skill session-start or /install-skill document if Claude says either isn’t installed.
The start of a session — /session-start
What this does. Reads your recent activity — the last few session handover notes, your friction log, your decision log, today’s daily note — and gives you a short briefing. What was open. What’s overdue. What you were probably about to do next.
When to use it.
- First thing every time you open Claude Code, before you ask it to do real work.
- When context feels stale: “wait, what was I doing in this project again?”
- After a few days away: “catch me up.”
How to use it. In the Code tab, type:
/session-startRead the report. Pick what you want to work on. Go.
The end of a session — /document
What this does. Summarises the session you just had — what got done, what was decided, what’s still open — and writes a structured entry to a session-handover log in your vault. The next day’s /session-start reads this entry first.
When to use it.
- End of a working session, before you close the window.
- When the conversation has gotten long enough that a fresh start would be useful.
- When you’d say “wrap up”, “save progress”, or “checkpoint” —
/documentis the formal version of those.
How to use it. Type:
/documentClaude proposes a summary, lists the decisions made, lists what’s still open. Read it. Edit anything that’s off. Accept. Done.
If the session involved a real decision worth remembering (“we decided to switch from X to Y because Z”), Claude will offer to record it in a decision log too — so future-you doesn’t re-litigate it in three months.
The shape
That’s the daily shape:
- Open Claude Code.
/session-start— read what was happening.- Do your work — meetings, transcripts, drafts, project edits, whatever.
/document— write the handover before you close.
The first session you do this for is a bit of a no-op (no handover to read from). By session three, the value compounds — every morning you sit down already oriented.
What’s next
Keep project notes current — the third workflow shortcut, run after a substantive session to sweep all the related project notes and bring them up to date with what just happened.