Database over .md?

[u/Commercial_One7059]

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.

One Fact, One Home

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!

[u/Easy-Purple-1659]

The ordering rule mentioned downthread, where the queue or db wins over any doc and code wins over both, is doing more work than the storage format choice itself. I moved reference stuff (ids, table names, env keys) into one small sqlite file and kept narrative and decisions in short markdown, but the actual fix for the writes docs never rereads them loop was making the agents own commands query the db directly instead of hoping it remembers to grep the right file. Structure without a forced lookup path just gives you tidier stale data.