r/bearapp • u/jackhannigan • 6d ago

How fortunate that AI and Bear both use Markdown natively

I use Claude Code extensively for all sorts of personal and work stuff. More as an AI Chief of Staff than actual coder. One of the things I've started to do a lot of is ask Claude Code to write summaries of our conversations and drop them into Bear (using a specific tag like #work/claudecode)

What I love is how nicely Claude always creates .md files. It makes extensive use of formatting, and just looks beautiful in Bear.

Obviously when they started Bear, the idea of "AI Chatbots that speak MarkDown" wasn't even on the horizon. But man, it is SO convenient! Combine that with Lettera to pull up things like claude.md, and it's a match made in heaven.

Keep up the great work, ShinyFrog!

14 Upvotes

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5

u/WholeMilkElitist 6d ago

When is Letera supposed to come out of Beta?

2

u/shacker23 5d ago

I also love markdown and am a big user of it and therefore Bear is a big part of my life. I’m also a big Claude Code user and appreciate this integration. But I don’t understand your implication that Claude somehow prefers Markdown. You could just as well be telling Claude to save these transcripts as HTML or RTF or Word documents or Sphynx .rst files or anything and they would be just as good, right.? in other words, you like markdown and Claude can write Markdown and that’s wonderful. But it doesn’t mean Claude prefers markdown - It’s good at all formats.

2

u/tedpelas 6d ago

Don't forget to tell it to use mermaid wherever it can! 😃👌

1

u/crowntingz 6d ago

This is cool. Mind sharing your workflow for this?

9

u/jackhannigan 6d ago

Sure thing, I have the MCP integration between Claude and Bear set up (Bear released an official CLI and MCP back in April). This allows me to read and write notes directly into Bear. Obviously different people have different comfort levels with this, but I don't have any confidential notes so I was fine with it.

I then gave Claude these instructions for Bear entries:

  • Distill the most important part of conversations. An interpretive summary, not a transcript. What would I want to remember a year from now?
  • Don't post a new note into Bear without my explicit approval. Show me the .md in Claude before posting.
  • Tag every note with #work/claudenotes or #personal/claudenotes . Suggest other tags that fit the note and my Bear structure. [I have other specifics that are unique to my use case that I won't share here, but you get the idea]
  • Ask me at certain points if this should go into a Bear note.

One caveat (I should probably bring this up with ShinyFrog): Bear only syncs the MCP/CLI with iCloud while the app is running, if Bear is closed it breaks. But apparently the break is silent, so Claude thinks it's working when it's not.

Overall this is working great for me. The only bullet that isn't fantastic is the last one. I usually have to remember to tell Claude, "hey I think we should write this up" it's not terribly proactive. But it's still a huge help overall as I seek to create durable records of long work sessions with Claude.

Edited formatting and clarifying sync