AI Forgets Context? Keep Game Decisions Across Chats

Your AI forgets context because a new chat usually starts empty and a long chat gets shortened so it can keep going. Keep your game's decisions in a short handover note, and start every session by having the AI read it.

How can you tell it has forgotten?

Say you are making Mossgate Market, an invented village trading game. On Tuesday you and your AI decide that prices change only at dawn, because players should be able to plan their day. On Friday it adds a price update every minute.

That is the clearest sign, but there are quieter ones:

• It asks something you already answered.
• It brings back a feature you removed.
• It renames things, and your coin purse becomes a wallet.
• It explains your own game back to you, confidently and slightly wrong.

When you see one of these, stop and fix the memory first. Otherwise the next three changes are built on the wrong picture.

What does each tool keep?

As of 2 November 2026, from each tool's own pages:

• Claude Code. Each session begins fresh. Your CLAUDE.md file and the tool's own notes carry over. A long session gets summarised, and that file is read in again afterwards, while the rest of the chat survives only as a summary.
• Cursor. When the conversation fills up, it gets summarised. Cursor keeps the old chat as a file its agent can search, which helps, but only if it thinks to look.
• ChatGPT. Memory is selective. OpenAI says it does not keep every detail from every conversation.

So all three keep something, and none of them promises to keep your decision about dawn. If your problem is plot and characters, why AI forgets my story has the file for that. This page is for rules, removed features and work in progress.

What goes in a handover note?

Five lines are enough, as long as they are the right five. Here is one for the invented market game:

Handover, Friday
Works now: buying and selling at the market, day and night.
Decided: prices change only at dawn, so players can plan their day.
Removed: the haggling minigame. Do not bring it back.
Half done: rain slows the cart, but only on the first road.
Next: make rain slow the cart on all roads.

"Removed" is the line most people forget, and it is the one that stops old ideas from coming back. Keep the whole note to one page by deleting what no longer matters. The prompt below also asks for a small drawing of how the game fits together, so that a fresh chat starts with the whole picture and you can see at a glance if it is wrong.

Should you start a new chat?

• Same task, going well: stay.
• New task, nothing to do with the last one: start a new chat.
• The AI has clearly lost the thread: update the note, then start a new chat. A summary of a confused chat is a confused summary.

Paste this to your AI

You do not reliably remember our past sessions, so we will use a handover note.

Read the project and this conversation, then write handover.md with five parts: what works now, what we decided and why, what we removed, what is half done, and what comes next.

Put a small Mermaid diagram at the top that shows how the main parts of the game connect today. Check each arrow against the real game, and mark any arrow you could not check.

Include only what you can point to: a place in the game, a file, or something I said here, quoted. Mark everything else "not sure" and ask me about it. Never fill a gap from memory.

At the start of each new session, read handover.md and quote the three decisions most likely to matter for today's work. Before we stop, update the file and the diagram, and show me what changed.

Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP

How to check it worked

• Open a brand-new chat. Ask how often prices change and why, without pasting anything. The answer should come from the note.
• Ask about something you removed. It should say it was removed, not offer to build it.
• Ask about something you never decided. It should say that this has not been decided yet.
• Reread the note after a week. If it has grown past a page, ask your AI to cut what no longer matters, and check that no decision went with it.