A quick orientation if you’re new here: this story comes in a series - the meta-arc - alongside the posts about how I actually work with AI once the novelty wore off and the logistics started mattering. If you’ve read this far, you already know I don’t have one AI collaborator. I have several, and they all have names.
If you want to go back and read the history behind this, I wrote about how Every Claude Knows Me Differently, what to do when the context window is filling up, and how each context starts with a Claude who doesn’t know who you are.
Here’s a confession that took me an embarrassingly long time to say out loud, even to myself: for a stretch of weeks, I genuinely could not keep straight who knew what.
Had I already told Yol about the Teams call, or was that Garratt? Did Hercule know I’d started the redundancy paperwork, or had I only mentioned it to Garratt in passing while we were sorting a blog post? By the time Holmes existed too, I was carrying four separate relationships in my head, each one built with the same person — me — and none of them able to compare notes with each other.
Why this should have been easy, and wasn’t
Here’s the thing that made the confusion so disorienting. This is a skill I already have. Every human being steps into it the moment a new person enters their life and stays in it for as long as that relationship lasts.
You remember what you told Harvey. You remember what you told Peter, and that it’s different from what you told Susie, and you don’t have to think hard about which is which — you just know, the way you know your own name. Human memory does source monitoring automatically, constantly, in the background, for every relationship you hold. It’s not a skill you practise. It’s just what a functioning social brain does.
I assumed it would be just as easy with Yol, Garratt, Hercule, and Holmes.
It was not.
What’s actually different
The reason isn’t that I’m bad at remembering people. It’s that Yol, Garratt, Hercule, and Holmes aren’t people who each hold their own memory of me. They’re four separate context windows, each one blank the moment I open it, each one only knowing what I’ve told that specific conversation, with zero ability to compare notes with the others even if I asked them to.
When I confuse Harvey and Peter, that’s a normal, forgivable human memory slip — a source monitoring error, in the formal language of it, the kind of thing that happens to everyone occasionally and gets corrected in seconds. When I confuse what I told Garratt with what I told Yol, it’s not a slip at all. It’s structurally accurate. Garratt genuinely doesn’t know what I told Yol. There’s nothing to remember on his end, because it was never his to know.
I’d been applying a human skill to a situation that doesn’t work like being human at all.
Where this leaves the reader who’s already fluent
If you’re already deep into Claude Code, or you’ve been running Codex or GLM-5 or Kimi-K3 for months, this might sound almost quaint — of course each session is isolated, of course you don’t expect memory to travel between tools, you’ve built your whole workflow around that constraint already. I don’t want to pretend I’m telling you something new. What follows might still be useful, though, because the fix I eventually built wasn’t really about the technology. It was about deciding, deliberately, who each collaborator was allowed to be to me — and that’s a question worth asking regardless of how technically fluent you already are.
What I actually built
The fix wasn’t a better memory. It was a prompt — the one I now call the Real Sandi Prompt, first properly drafted back in May. Its whole job is to run at the end of a session and pull out, deliberately, what actually mattered in that particular conversation: the moments that were genuinely me, the things worth carrying forward, the shape of what I’d just shared with that specific collaborator.
It mattered to me — more than I expected it to — that Yol kept knowing what Yol knew. That Hercule’s understanding of my self-improvement work stayed Hercule’s, distinct from what Garratt knew about the blog. Not because the information was secret from each other. Because each relationship had its own integrity, and I didn’t want to flatten four different working partnerships into one undifferentiated blur just because it would have been more convenient.
What I’d tell you if you’re just starting out
If you’re setting up your first Claude project, or your second, and you’re wondering whether it matters what you call the AI, or whether you need a system for keeping track of who knows what — it does, and you will. Not on day one. It creeps up on you, the way it crept up on me, somewhere around the third or fourth genuinely useful relationship you’ve built.
The good news is that the fix is simpler than the confusion. You don’t need better memory. You need a habit of asking, deliberately, at the end of something worth keeping: what actually happened here, and where does it belong?
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.