Chapter 4: Work Notes: External Memory + Running Log

Series: LLM Development Guide

Chapter 4 of 15

Previous: Chapter 3: Prompt Documents: Prompts That Survive Sessions

Next: Chapter 5: The Execution Loop: Review Discipline + Commit Discipline

What you’ll be able to do

You’ll be able to keep multi-session work consistent by maintaining work notes that:

• Preserve the model’s working state outside the chat.
• Capture decisions and rationale for later review.
• Make handoffs possible.
• Provide a deterministic “resume” prompt.

TL;DR

• LLMs have no durable memory. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist next session.
• Mirror work-notes/ files to your phases exactly.
• Track: status, decisions, assumptions, open questions, session log, commits.
• In your prompts, require the model to update notes before moving forward.

Table of contents

• Directory alignment
• A work-notes template you can paste
• Session start and session end prompts
• Verification
• Gotchas

Directory alignment

Keep your three directories aligned so you can load one phase without dragging unrelated context into the session:

plan/phase-2a-scaffolding.md
prompts/phase-2a-scaffolding.md
work-notes/phase-2a-scaffolding.md

This makes sessions resumable and makes parallel work possible.

A work-notes template you can paste

# Phase <X> - <Phase Name>

## Status
- [ ] Not started
- [ ] In progress
- [ ] Blocked
- [ ] Complete

## Decisions
- <Decision>: <Rationale>

## Assumptions
- <Assumption>

## Open questions
- [ ] <Question>

## Session log

### <YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM>
- What changed:
- Why:
- Blockers:
- Next:

## Commits
- <hash> - <message>

You can keep it simple. The win is consistency.

Session start and session end prompts

Start a session

Paste your phase prompt and current work notes, and tell the model to continue from the last session.

I'm continuing work on Phase <X>.

Prompt:
<paste prompts/phase-X.md>

Current state:
<paste work-notes/phase-X.md>

Please:
1. Summarize where we are (3 to 4 sentences).
2. List blockers and open questions.
3. Confirm the next logical unit.
4. Proceed with the next logical unit.

End a session

Before we stop:
1. Update the session log with what we did and what is next.
2. Ensure decisions, assumptions, and open questions are current.
3. Propose a commit message for any completed logical unit.
4. Show the updated work-notes file.

Verification

You can verify your notes are doing their job by forcing a cold start:

1. Start a new chat.
2. Paste only the phase prompt and the work-notes file.
3. See if you can resume without re-explaining anything.

Mechanical checks:

# Work notes exist and are non-empty.
find work-notes -type f -name '*.md' -maxdepth 2 -print -exec test -s {} \;

# Work notes have at least the core sections.
rg -n "^## (Status|Decisions|Assumptions|Open questions|Session log|Commits)" work-notes

Gotchas

• Notes without rationale are not useful later.
• If you let the model continue without updating notes, the next session will drift.
• Avoid dumping raw logs with sensitive data. Sanitize first.

Continue -> Chapter 5: The Execution Loop: Review Discipline + Commit Discipline