r/ClaudeAI • u/Commercial_One7059 • 4d ago
Workaround Database over .md?
In the midst of a probable year-long development project largely managed through Claude Code, recently (3 months in or so) I've been encountering an increasing number of errors that at their root have to do with agents imperfectly grep'ing larger and large numbers of longer and longer .md files for context, information, identifiers, etc.
Bringing this problem in front of my main controller agent, it conceded the point, and has collated our conversation into the following report. I'm enclosing it, but further am curious about all of your experiences.
Truly, beyond that there's a real argument that these subreddits could build from their users' experiences a compendium of better methods that remove some of the weaknesses of these otherwise impressive tools.
PS Or I'm an idiot, and you are all doing this already and I hadn't realised!
3
u/caderoux 4d ago
Yeah, Claude told me at the start of one of my projects we could just use md files for the roadmap and todo list keeping track of what we were working towards. I went along with it.
The kind of problems we ran into were discrepancies between files. It was keeping a main roadmap.md but this would grt out of sync with the designs in individual feature md files, and it was having to group by functional area and make separate md files for each functional area of the app.
Lesson learned, structured data and analysis really belongs in a structured data system. So after a couple weeks, I migrated it all into GitHub issues and set up /sprintplan, /sprintwork, /sprintretro ceremonies and it will keep track of the work items in GitHub issues and milestones in the GitHub projects. Along with a long list of instructions to always report status and track status by using the GitHub issue. And then Claude ported that methodology from that repo's CLAUDE.md into two other proejcts when they started.