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Claude Code Transcripts Expire in 30 Days - Write Ten Lines

Your code survives the weekend; the conversation that remembers how to start it doesn’t. A hand-written NOTES.txt in the folder with your code — five headings, no git, no install — is what makes Tuesday cost four minutes instead of forty.

The conversation you built your project in is weather, not documentation: on Claude Code 2.1.42 the transcripts are real files in ~/.claude/projects with a 30-day default retention swept on startup, and the setting people reach for to stop that — cleanupPeriodDays 0 — actually stops transcripts being written at all. The fix is a ten-line hand-written NOTES.txt in the folder with your code, five headings, which doubles as the opening paste for your next AI session.

Written by Maya Okafor — already drafted, fact-checked and signed off by the editor.