save-state

name	save-state
description	Claude Code save state: workflow guidelines, best practices, instructions, and integration examples

Save State

When to activate

Activate when the user has been working for a long session, token usage is getting high, the context window is near full, or the user is about to run the /clear command and wants to preserve their place. Invoked via /save-state.

When NOT to use

Do not use at the very beginning of a session, for quick one-off queries, or if the user is just asking a general knowledge question.

Instructions

1. Pause any file reading or external tool usage.
2. Review the entire conversation history of the current session.
3. Synthesize a hyper-condensed summary of the current working state.
4. Create or overwrite a file named CLAUDE_STATE.md in the project root (or current directory) with the following structure:
   • Current Goal: 1-sentence description of the overarching objective.
   • Completed Work: 2-3 bullet points of specific files modified, bugs fixed, or features implemented in this session.
   • Discovered Context: 2-3 bullet points of crucial architectural facts learned (e.g., "The auth token is passed in the header X-API-Key, not a cookie" or "The database schema for Users uses UUIDs, not auto-incrementing integers").
   • Pending Tasks: The immediate next 1-2 steps that need to be taken.
5. Instruct the user with exactly this message: "State successfully saved to CLAUDE_STATE.md. You can now safely run the /clear command to reset your context window and save tokens. After clearing, simply prompt me with: 'Resume from CLAUDE_STATE.md'."

Example

User: /save-state Claude: Synthesizing current context... [Writes CLAUDE_STATE.md] State successfully saved to CLAUDE_STATE.md. You can now safely run the /clear command to reset your context window and save tokens. After clearing, simply prompt me with: 'Resume from CLAUDE_STATE.md'.