CLAUDE.md updater - Claude skills for journalism

When to use

User says "update claude.md" or "add this to context"
User asks "what should we remember?" or to "save this lesson"
User wants to persist something learned in the current session for future runs
A session surfaced a hard-won lesson, a new path, or an infrastructure change

Core workflow

Step 1

Scan the conversation

Look for the signals that mark something worth keeping: "fixed", "the issue was", "turns out", "deployed", "configured", "new endpoint", "doesn't work", "workaround".

Step 2

Categorize: durable facts only

Route hard-won lessons, infrastructure changes, and new workflows to the right CLAUDE.md sections. Transient session notes do not go in CLAUDE.md.

Step 3

Build the exact diff

Produce a unified diff against the current CLAUDE.md showing the precise lines and sections to change. The diff is what gets approved, not a summary of it.

Step 4

Present for approval

Show the diff, then a short per-category summary. Nothing is written until the user approves the exact edits.

What it captures

Hard-won lessons

Non-obvious causes from debugging, workarounds for tool limits, anti-patterns found through failure.

Infrastructure changes

New services, endpoints, paths, or credential pointers (where a secret lives, never the value).

New workflows

Commands that solve recurring problems and multi-step processes worth repeating.

Updated information

Changed ports, IPs, or URLs, new capabilities, and deprecated or removed features.

You approve a diff, not a summary

The approval gate shows the exact patch first, so you can see every line before it lands:

## Proposed CLAUDE.md updates

```diff
--- a/CLAUDE.md
+++ b/CLAUDE.md
@@ Hard-won lessons @@
 ### Hard-won lessons
+- Plain `timeout` kills the Node tree; use `timeout --foreground` in tmux.
```

Summary of the diff above:
- Hard-won lessons: timeout --foreground note

Apply this diff? Nothing is written until you approve.

What stays out of CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md is checked into git and loads into every session, so it is for durable, infrequently-changing facts, not a running log. The skill keeps these out:

Transient "what we did today" session summaries
Anything that changes frequently
Things Claude learns over time through corrections

Those belong in auto memory (~/.claude/projects/<project>/memory/, which Claude maintains on its own) or a gitignored CLAUDE.local.md. This mirrors the project-memory skill's guidance.

Installation

# Recommended: install the dev-toolkit plugin

/plugin marketplace add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism

/plugin install dev-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism

# Or copy just this skill from the plugin tree

git clone https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism.git

cp -r claude-skills-journalism/dev-toolkit/skills/claude-md-updater ~/.claude/skills/

Or browse this skill in the GitHub repository.

Related skills

Project memory One-way door