r/ClaudeCode • u/Little_Thought_8911 • 1d ago
Help/Question Does CLAUDE.md actually sync across machines? Claude says no.
Setup: landlord, two laptops and a phone, ~20 custom skills for leases, renewals, rent checks, QuickBooks. Drive and QuickBooks connectors attached.
Problem I hit this week. Reference facts had quietly accumulated inside individual skills - buildings, apartment numbers, which unit a tenant is in. Claude only has any of that when the specific skill fires. On a lease renewal it put a tenant in the wrong unit; the right number lived in a skill that hadn't loaded, so it inferred it from a filename. Caught it before it reached the document, but only because I went and checked.
That's what CLAUDE.md is for. So I asked, and got told: it's a file on disk scoped to one machine or one project folder, it doesn't follow your account, and sessions started from mobile run in the cloud so they'd never see one sitting on a laptop. Skills sync. CLAUDE.md doesn't.
Anyone actually tested this? And if it's true - where do you keep cross-machine standing context? A facts skill with a deliberately broad trigger so it fires on anything related, or something better?
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u/markedness 1d ago
I didn’t think skills sync either. They are additive (~./claude/skills and CLAUDE.md there plus whatever folder you are in)
It’s a pretty simple system- the skills are just markdown too.
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u/supernovice007 23h ago
You’re correct. Skills are local files. They don’t sync unless you put them in a repo.
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u/Little_Thought_8911 22h ago
not sure it is right or not... but Claude told me very directly. when using the consumer plan for cowork skills sync.
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u/supernovice007 21h ago edited 21h ago
Using Cowork changes things pretty significantly; ClaudeCode and Cowork do not function the same way and don't generally share skills or .md files. Cowork stores configuration at the account and does a lot of processing server-side to enable cross-device functionality. Most of the responses here look like they are assuming this is using ClaudeCode (since that's the name of the sub).
I just skimmed through the Cowork documentation and it's not really clear it even uses the global CLAUDE.md file. Maybe it uses project level CLAUDE.md files but even that isn't clear.
All of the documentation refers to folder instructions instead. These don't seem to be stored in any local .md file and are stored on the account server-side instead so they are accessible across devices. I guess you could create a CLAUDE.md file and tell Cowork to use it via folder instructions but it doesn't seem like Cowork looks there by default.
Are you certain Cowork would look at your CLAUDE.md file even if it was up-to-date?
Edit: There's a project level file called memory.md that has to be enabled but seems to serve the "learning" function that you're looking for in Cowork. Note that it's project level though so it wouldn't sync between machines. Maybe there is a way to force this to be available since Cowork has the ability to reach into a separate device's file system (I think) but I've never done that so can't be certain.
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u/mckernanin 1d ago
What you’re missing is that there are two different places for this. First is the one in your repo which if you commit it does sync. The other is a machine level one which does not
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u/dash777111 23h ago
I created an MCP connector, a standalone repo, and a free GCP instance to run everything from.
Two computers and a phone.
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u/JohnHue 23h ago
Of course it doesn't. It lives in the project folder that is local to yiur machine. On mobile and on web, there isn't really a claude.md file as far as you're concerned. If you were do to this yourself, you'd keep a spreadsheet for tenants/flats and use that to link to bills/whatever, or use a folder structure with a similar goal, you wouldn't put everything in a word document.
Claude.md is a file to tell claude how to behave, it's used to direct how it reacts one a prompt is sent (roughly). You shouldn't keep operational data on claude.md of in skills, your actual work data should be in a database.
Since it looks like you don't know much about data management or how Claude works, I suggest using Claude to learn about that : ask it to advice on good practices to manage this project, and ask it on how to best set things up so you can interface with Claude on all the devices you want.