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π Every time you open Claude Code, it starts from scratch. It re-reads your files, re-discovers your project, and burns through tokens figuring out what it already knew yesterday. Here's how to fix that permanently.
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Why Your Current Setup Is Costing You
Here's what happens in a normal Claude Code session right now:
- Claude loads your CLAUDE.md (hundreds of tokens)
- You ask a question about your project
- Claude greps through your files, reads 5-10 of them, tries to piece together an answer
- That's thousands of tokens burned on discovery β not on actual work
Now multiply that by every conversation you have. You're paying for Claude to re-learn your project from scratch every single time. The fix: make Claude build and maintain a wiki that it reads from instead. One index scan, one targeted page read, done. That's 60-70% fewer tokens on knowledge lookups.
What You're Building
An Obsidian vault that Claude Code maintains for you:
- A wiki of interlinked markdown pages β one page per topic, project, concept, or person. Claude writes and updates all of them.
- A "hot context" file (hot.md) β a rolling snapshot of the last few days. What you're working on, what changed, what Claude needs to know right now.
- An index file β a lightweight table of contents Claude scans to find exactly what it needs.
- Tiered retrieval β wiki summaries first (fast, cheap), raw source files when it needs the full picture.
- Conversation logging β every session gets a timestamped summary. Claude remembers last Tuesday.
- Automatic archiving β stale pages get flagged for your approval. Wiki stays lean.
- Obsidian's graph view β visual map of everything Claude knows.
The Real Unlock: Tiered Retrieval
The wiki doesn't replace your original files β it sits in front of them. Think of it like a cache:
Tier 1 β hot.md (every session, ~500 tokens). What you're working on. Last few days. Major changes. Read first, every time.