How It Works Skill for Claude
Explain how claude-mem captures observations, when memory injection kicks in, and where data lives. Use when the user asks "how does claude-mem work?" or "what is this thing doing?".
Install
one command, takes just this skill from the repositorynpx skills add https://github.com/thedotmack/claude-mem --skill how-it-worksWhat comes with it
1 009 bytes besides the instructionThe instruction itself
4 sections, as written by the authorHow claude-mem works
What it does
Every Read, Edit, and Bash that Claude makes turns into a compressed observation. Observations get summarized at session end. Relevant ones get auto-injected into future prompts so the next session starts with context from the last one — no re-explaining the codebase, no re-discovering decisions.
When it kicks in
Memory injection starts on your second session in a project.
The first session in a fresh project seeds memory; subsequent sessions receive auto-injected context for relevant past work. Run /learn-codebase if you want to front-load the entire repo into memory in a single pass (~5 minutes, optional).
Where data lives
Everything stays in ~/.claude-mem on this machine.
Nothing leaves your machine except calls to whichever AI provider you configured for compression (Claude / OpenRouter / Gemini). The SQLite database, vector index, logs, and settings all live under that directory and are removed cleanly on npx claude-mem uninstall.
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How to use it
Take thedotmack/how-it-works from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.
The instructions reference npx.
Without those the skill loads but fails at the first command.