Give an agent persistent memory and identity
A developer gave a Claude Code agent memory and an identity, then reported back on what it was doing four months later.
Done withClaude Code
- What they did
- Justin Headley ran a Claude Code agent, reached through Telegram, that starts a session with its memory and identity loaded and shuts down afterward. Most of the infrastructure was written by the agent: a process manager for sessions, layered memory, and identity re-injection after each start or compaction. A separate AI reviews outbound actions such as emails and pushes before they go out. The agent has email access and runs scheduled jobs.
- How it went
- After four months the agent, named Dawn, ran 59 scheduled jobs and had dealt with 470+ people. It also ran a week-long open source collaboration he didn't know about. A Feb 22 session destroyed production data, which was restored from a four-day-old backup.
- Worth knowing
- The first single-file memory overflowed the agent's working memory in about a week. A commenter who tried Instar spent roughly $25 and 12 hours without getting it working, and said it was expensive to run.
Try it yourself with Claude Code
In my project folder [path], set up a persistent memory file and a short identity description for you (name, role, how I like to work, current goals: [goals]). Update the memory at the end of each session with what you did, decisions made, and open tasks. Finished means I can start a fresh session and you can summarize where we left off from the memory alone.
Source: DEV · Mar 17, 2026
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