Six Commands and a Startup Run by Bots

I work in the Claude desktop app these days, and the reason is simple: every project I have going is right there on the left side. In VS Code the editor holds one project at a time, so I'm swiping across desktops or alt-tabbing all day. Reading the code matters less to me than knowing where I've been working and what's running.

So we start something new. Startdown is an idea I've had for a while, a startup run by bots, with three personas taken from Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited: the entrepreneur, the manager and the technician (that's me). I run /init on an empty folder, and Claude is smart enough to say there's nothing to document yet, so I describe the project with a quick prompt dump and it writes the CLAUDE.md and scaffolds the thing, borrowing the setup from Flatbed along the way. From nothing to something.

Then the rest of the starter bits. /plan and plan mode, which a lot of people love and I find to be a halfway solution (don't hit me with process when I'm goofing around), though pairing it with Fable to brainstorm is pretty neat. /model to switch what's underneath. /clear, which you're going to use all the time, and /resume to get back to a session you walked away from.

Last is /memory, which is really a lesson about context. The model sitting in Anthropic's data center is stateless and doesn't remember a thing about you; the whole conversation gets passed along every time. What Claude Code adds on top is AGENTS.md (the soul of your project, keep it terse), your user instructions in ~/.claude, and auto memory, which is handy right up until it remembers you used Go last week when you wanted Elixir.

Running init on a brand new, empty project:

/init

The project description I dictated when init asked what startdown is going to be (as Wispr Flow typed it):

This is going to be a fun little business-in-a-box project with orchestration of agents. I might have a business co-founder. Call them the entrepreneur, and then I'll have me as the technician, and then finally the manager. This all comes from the email revisited. I want to have these three personas represented as bots, and maybe you put some context about Enith Revisited in there. That would be good. As far as conventions, I want to use VNext with Cloudflare free deployment as my prototype.

Switching into plan mode:

/plan

Switching models from the CLI:

/model

My prompt once plan mode is on:

I want to build the initial app, what should I do?

Starting the session over with a clean context:

/clear

Going back to a previous session:

/resume

Seeing where Claude Code keeps its memory:

/memory