I built a skill for Claude because the memories it was saving about me had started to bog it down instead of help. The file kept growing, and the bigger it got the worse Claude got with it.

The memory file is just where Claude writes down the rules, preferences and little facts it learns from you, so it can sculpt itself towards the way you actually want it to work.

Why memory files always bloat

The trouble is the file only ever grows in one direction. You keep adding, and it bloats. And the more you stuff into a large language model's context, the worse it gets, not only at recalling any single fact, but at staying consistent. Before long you've filled it with contradictions, rules quietly fighting each other, instead of a clean set of preferences steering the model the way you meant.

A skill that prunes the file with you, one line at a time

So I made the skill interview you, rather than deciding on its own what to keep and what to kill. It works through the file line by line and points things out: this phrase is repeated, cut it and I'll still understand the shorter version, so you save context; or, this line contradicts something we read three sentences ago, so which one do you actually want me to follow? It goes through the whole file and tidies up the crap, but only ever in a way you've agreed to.

It won't quietly make its own decisions and leave you with a set of hollowed-out preferences that no longer steer it properly. At every step it asks what matters, so nothing important gets cut by accident. And it shows you a diff: the original line on top, the suggested version underneath, so you can see exactly which words are going and which are staying. You agree, you reword it, or you tell it to leave that memory alone.

Download the Memory Cleanup skill (free) →

Unzip it, drop the folder with the SKILL.md in alongside your other Claude skills (ask Claude where that lives if you're not sure), and say "let's do a memory cleanup". I run it every week or two. A lean memory file is one the assistant actually follows.

I made it free because I wanted it for myself, couldn't find it anywhere, and it doesn't feel right charging for a text file that does a job, even though I know plenty of people would.

I also make software. Some of it's free, some of it's a small one-off payment. No bullshit: no subscriptions, no telemetry, none of that rubbish. Just simple software for people who remember how software used to behave back in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s before Facebook and MicroSlop and the general corporate machine started ruining it. John Carmack and Chris Sawyer are my coding heroes, not the bastards who invented popups and dark patterns.