If you use Claude Code on a real project for more than one-off coding tasks, you eventually hit the same wall: the model is good at solving the task in front of it, but every new session still has to reconstruct the project. For me, that got especially annoying in a solo-dev monorepo. I was not just asking Claude to write code. I was also using it for: backlog triage bug capture planning the next task weekly status summaries preserving decisions across sessions At some point I realized I was trying to solve a workflow problem with a better prompt. That was the wrong move. What helped was building a thin project-ops layer around Claude Code instead. My current version uses Jira MCP for backlog work, Confluence for published reports, a local JSON context DB for working memory, maintainer docs for durable context, and a few commands like /standup , /bug , and /rfe . Then I pulled the reusable parts into a public starter repo without shipping the private project details around them.…