It's not 100% clear to me if I can leave memory OFF for my regular chats but turn it ON for individual projects.
I don't want any memories from my general chats leaking through to my projects - in fact I don't want memories recorded from my general chats at all. I don't want project memories leaking to other projects or to my general chats.
I think you can either have the memory on or off but according to the docs the projects have their own separate memory so it wont leak across the projects or from non-project chats:
"Each project has its own separate memory space and dedicated project summary, so the context within each of your projects is focused, relevant, and separate from other projects or non-project chats."
I suspect that’s probably what they’ve built. For example:
all_memories:
Topic1: [{}…]
Topic2: [{}..]
The only way topics would pollute each other would be if they didn’t set up this basic data structure.
Claude Memory, and others like it, are not magic on any level. One can easily write a memory layer with simple clear thinking - what to bucket, what to consolidate and summarize, what to reference, and what to pull in.
You’d never know sometimes. People sit around in amazement at coding agents or things like Claude memory, but really these are simple things to code :)
> Individual project conversations (searches are limited to within each specific project).
> Each project has its own separate memory space and dedicated project summary, so the context within each of your projects is focused, relevant, and separate from other projects or non-project chats.
Each project should have its own memory and general chats should not pollute that.
According to the docs "How to search and reference past chats", you need to explicit ask for it, and it's reflected as a tool call. I'm wondering if you just can tell Claude to not look into memory in the conversation, if as they claim, it's so easy to spot Claude using this feature.
I don't want any memories from my general chats leaking through to my projects - in fact I don't want memories recorded from my general chats at all. I don't want project memories leaking to other projects or to my general chats.